9 ms·

I don’t think it’s just a UK thing, or that it’s much easier to start a hardware startup in the USA. I think it’s more that the bar for getting a hardware star

I don’t think it’s just a UK thing, or that it’s much easier to start a hardware startup in the USA. I think it’s more that the bar for getting a hardware startup off the ground is much higher than a software startup - everywhere in the world. Personally I’ve been trying to self-fund and bootstrap a hardware startup (based in Australia but I’m reasonably well connected in Silicon Valley as I’m a YC alum). I’ve had plenty of early success and validation of all my market theses, but it’s super hard to get any investors interested. Plenty say “exciting” and want to chat. All lose interest when you start talking funding needs and path to market. In a world in which investors and other startup industry contacts are accustomed to seeing a bootstrapped SaaS app showing signs of growth and revenue just a few months in, with a hardware startup it’s just impossible to avoid looking like a failure by comparison - due to all the costs, delays and complications involved with getting an MVP to market. And because successful hardware startups are so scarce relative to software ones, it’s hard even to get any good advice; there’s just barely anyone around with good, relevant experience to share (and I already know many of the people who have built companies in this vertical in past decades, none of whom are in SV). I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make it work is to start by achieving success as a software startup, then transition into hardware to later - but even then you’d have to convince investors that it’s worth the risk. In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy SaaS wins over the past decade, and that’s all that most investors are willing to even consider. The exceptions are “start-big and-get-huge-fast” plays like Groq - but the founders of that company were already highly credentialed and connected when they started, and even then vanishingly few investors are willing/able to fund new companies like that. That’s not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can pull off, anywhere.

sylware 2y ago
Yep, look at RISC-V, the most promising hardware is from the USA. It is not yet on the latest silicon process, but with the latest GPU, I guess we could run the latest games, until the game devs recompile and QA a bit their games (obviously on elf/linux)
- jononor 2y ago
  Most promising by what definition? And what subset of applications/markets are you considering? In the microcontroller space, China is leading on RISC-V. EspressIf, WCH, et.c are already shipping units at scale. Of course these are low value chips, but the volumes are large. The combined shipments for microcontrollers are in tens of billions of units annually. The technology choices in the space changes slowly (32 bit over 8/16bit is quite recent...), but over the next 10 years RISC-V looks poised to take a decent chunk.
  - sylware 2y ago
    Look at risc-v official web site, some company called sifive and their UEFI workstation boards. And I want to be able to buy a USB-C RV64 SOC (without ARM blocks) with tons of GPIOs for my future keyboard controller.
zipy124 2y ago
The largest problem I see is shipping times. If I need to download a new software "part" (library or other), the shipping time is the download time, nearly instant. If I need new hardware pieces, its either next day shipping, a few days by air-freight or three weeks on a boat from china. This limits prototype turnover time, and means iterating quick is much harder. Finally you have the problem that hardware is expensive and an additional cost. A hardware startup has all the same costs as a software company but with the addition of hardware.
- tomhoward 2y ago
  That’s a big part of it. But mostly it’s that your dev+deploy+evaluate cycle is so much slower. With web software you can write a feature or bug-fix and push to prod in minutes - and repeat that many times a day. With hardware each equivalent cycle is weeks or months (especially in my vertical - farms).
  - zipy124 2y ago
    That's what I meant by prototype turnover time, your iteration cycle.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Some of us write software for embedded devices where a mistake in programning means a critical machine in a remote area needs someone to physically go there and thus spend months in test before we dare deploy. Some of us care about quality and won't allow a customer to see bugs thus even though we can deploy in seconds our reputation won't allow it. There is also software that bugs can kill people so again we won't deploy without evtensive testing - much of this is regulated and we would go to prison for deploying at will even if it works. those who work in any of the above react in horror to stories of how the web deploys to production so fast. we know we are not perfect and don't understand how you would risk it.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  True but that reality applies to all your competitors. Your investors should care about your performance relative to the market.
Folcon 2y ago
Just to chime in and say that bootstrapping does work in this domain, I say that as someone who's had a few friends go down that route, but yes, it's really tough. There's also people I know who built small scale solutions and then managed to push that into funding and funnily enough a Kickstarter as well though I don't think he'd recommend anyone follow that route.
hintymad 2y ago
UK ignited the First Industrial Revolution. It's sad to see that UK has slipped to number 16 or lower when it came to the market share of global manufacturing. And the problem is not to just UK, but to pretty much all the developed countries. Many nations and people have benefited greatly from globalization, but I have to ask: is it worth it if the cost is forfeiting my own country's manufacturing know-how and supply chains? And yes, I'm fully aware of the theory of comparative advantages, but in the meantime, but manufacturing can still bring great income to many families and nations still compete and even go to wars with each other, right?
- pjc50 2y ago
  Even the Americans can't manage economic isolation. It takes a global civilisation to build a smartphone. We might have been able to get closer to it by being in the EU, but now we're on our own on that one.
  - hintymad 2y ago
    Yeah, I do recognize that. I just wish that the US could have a healthy mixture of light and heavy industry, so that the cost building any mission critical systems will not go through the roof, and so that we will be able t build anything domestically if we want. Even though it's likely a pipe dream now, but at least the US can do so for the WW II and after WW II for quite some time.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      That ship sailed. It's like the other comment said - China embraces manufacturing to make other countries inept at it. It's not only that American precision engineering is mostly at parity with China, it's that manufacturing anywhere else is a waste of money. When unibody aluminum Macbook cases are machined, they never are machined in America. They're sold to Americans, marketed as an American company, but your device (even at the markup Apple charges) cannot be made economically in America, period. In a broader sense, I'd say that America is headed down the same road the UK is too. We expect people to pay hand-over-fist for our tech talent that isn't any better than what you can get in Pakistan or China. Our hard markets are getting bearish, our leadership wants to de-globalize, and American tech wants to maintain global control without acquiescing to local governance. America had the economic lead before WWI and after WWII, but now we've bet the farm on our ability to market bullshit. America's national economy cannot survive if the App Store and ChatGPT are our premier exports.
foobarian 2y ago
Would it be fair to say that the "unicorn" effect is a lot harder to achieve as well? If VC rely on 1 out of N startups doing well then that 1 success needs to achieve over N-fold returns just to break even. On the other hand I have no trouble coming up with examples of hardware companies that did well: Apple, Nvidia, Intel... but those time scales are titanic.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > Apple, Nvidia, Intel. Not sure they are great examples. Intel is going through a lot of pain now (but it's been very successful in the past). Apple was in a terrible situation before its reverse acquisition by NeXT (NeXT paid one Steve Jobs for all of Apple and got $400 million in change). Nvidia got insanely lucky with Bitcoin, then with AI. Its original plan was to make 3D accelerators for gamers and, maybe, engineering workstations. All of them were a couple wrong decisions away from doom multiple times. Think Commodore, who made one of the most popular computers ever, only to be mismanaged into the ground.
  - nradov 2y ago
    Luck and timing obviously play huge roles. But I like to think that as an industry we no longer frequently make mistakes quite as outright stupid as Commodore management did. There are at least some generally understood tech industry best practices which prevent decisions like that when there is serious money at stake.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Nokia enters the chat
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  It's funny that you didn't mention Dell, Lenovo, Sony, or even Microsoft and Nintendo which both make their money off the software than the hardware, but are also companies that produce and selling hardware.
rbanffy 2y ago
> That’s not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can pull off, anywhere. The UK, with a comprehensive social safety net, should be more willing to take small risks. I know it's now what happens, but it'd be important to understand why something that should be actually isn't.
- varispeed 2y ago
  What safety net? UK does not have a safety net.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    That's fair. UC and the NHS are far from ideal, but, compared to the US, they are heaven.
    - kristianc 2y ago
      I think that needs to be qualified heavily — salaries in the UK are much lower both in nominal and PPP terms, so there's much less opportunity to build one's own safety net, and the NHS is overwhelmingly focused on providing care for the elderly. To a young(ish) startup founder, the presence of the NHS and UC makes little to no difference.
      - rbanffy 2y ago
        Maybe a good way to incentivize more risky entrepreneurs is to provide a better safety net. I would, however, caution against making it too perfect (and I hate myself for saying that, because I would prefer people worked on whatever brings them happiness, not money) - part of the drive for Americans (and the reason they risk so much on it) is the need to accumulate as much capital as possible as soon as possible, because they know they won't enjoy any sort of safety net when they grow old.
        kristianc 2y ago
        Let me rephrase — in the UK we have a generous and expanding safety net, for the elderly, voted for by the elderly, and paid for at great expense by the working population.
DrScientist 2y ago
Interested in your opinion on crowd-funding as a way of raising initial capital - ie cut out professional investors and go direct to potential customers?
- tomhoward 2y ago
  I've seen it work once, but it was hard over the long term: LIFX (smart light globes) [1], which was launched on Kickstarter in 2012 by people working from the same co-working space and accelerator I was involved with then (so I kinda had a backstage view on it). Products like that work if there's natural consumer appeal built into the product, that you can convey in a video that gets people excited imagining how much better their life would be. That's what motivates pre-purchasing and also sharing/virality. That's why the LIFX Kickstarter campaign worked. But even with the $1.3M crowdfunding, they needed a lot more funds from investors; the crowdfunding just helped with initial funding and to prove demand. Still, that company didn't turn out to be a big success. It was hard/slow to get the product into production and shipped to consumers – it took 2-3 years I think. Established lighting vendors like Phillips were quick to get competing products into major retail stores. Along the way the company seemed to have a lot of internal drama, and investors became disenchanted. The company was acquired in about 2019 [2], then that company went bust, then the LIFX assets were acquired again in 2022 [3]. So, from its early signs of huge potential success, it ends up being a cautionary tale and another case study that investors can look at as a reason not to invest in hardware startups. Another cautionary tale is the "Coolest Cooler" [4], which ended up in a lawsuit [5]. I heard someone mention that a factory they engaged in China held them to ransom (staff went "on strike" in the middle of production) but I don't know details beyond what's been reported. These cases demonstrate all the ways these kinds of projects can go wrong, and are much harder to turn around than a software project in which you can be building your product to maintain customer satisfaction and growth day-by-day. And even still, this approach only works for gimmicky consumer products, not B2B products that are more likely to work commercially in the long term. Edit: Also remember Pebble (watch) which was a huge Kickstarter hit and seemed like a successful company for a few years after that, then suddenly went bust. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollieslade/2013/12/11/eureka-how-lifx-raised-1-3-million-on-kickstarter-in-3-days-and-reinvented-the-lightbulb/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollieslade/2013/12/11/eureka-h... [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/building-energy-monitoring-company-buddy-acquire-smart-light-startup-lifx/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/building-energy-monitoring-com... [3] https://www.techhive.com/article/827458/lifx-smart-light-brand-has-a-new-owner.html https://www.techhive.com/article/827458/lifx-smart-light-bra... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/meta_the_massive_failure_of_the_coolest_cooler/ https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/... [5] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/meta_the_massive_failure_of_the_coolest_cooler/?rdt=46540 https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/...
momojo 2y ago
What are your thoughts on Anduril?
- tomhoward 2y ago
  The founder was already super rich and proven. I don't know much about the details about how it got started (i.e., how much Palmer Luckey self-funded it in the early stages) but the fact that he'd already built/sold Oculus was always going to make it easier to open doors and close funding deals (even if the politics/FB drama was a complication). Also, building tech for the US military has some advantages. You have one customer with very high stakes and very deep pockets. Obviously it's hard to get started and you need to be building something that's uniquely useful and valuable for defence purposes, but once you achieve that, once you're in the door of the military industry, you're on pretty solid ground, and that's attractive to investors. The one hardware company i know in Australia that's doing well is also making defence tech. It's much harder if all your potential customers (in my case, farmers) are small family businesses spread thinly in non-urban areas all over the world. Investors know that makes distrubuition much more challenging.
NickC25 2y ago
>I’ve had plenty of early success and validation of all my market theses, but it’s super hard to get any investors interested. Plenty say “exciting” and want to chat. All lose interest when you start talking funding needs and path to market. I started a non-tech food product company, and have found the exact same thing to be true in my line of work. It's odd. Here's a conversation I recently had with a potential investor. "You've got a years worth of sales to convince me you have found ideal PMF?" Yes. "You've found the resources you need to scale to the degree that I'd get a good return if sales continue to grow?" Yes. "You've built a small team with some industry vets, and have some great talent on your advisory board who know the ups and downs of building a brand and product in your chosen space?" Yes. "You've boostrapped your way to $100k in revenue, have developed a cult-like following in your local market and are seeking a small amount to be able to grow the product to a state-wide or nation-wide scale?" Yes. "How much do are you looking to raise?" Not a lot by modern standards. A million dollars would last us several years "Why should I invest in you? Your industry's traditional exit valuation isn't triple digit. Sorry" Why the fuck did you come to me and ask for this meeting? >In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy SaaS wins over the past decade, and that’s all that most investors are willing to even consider. This needs to be echoed from the rooftops. And seen by a whole bunch of investors/VCs whose hubris has prevented them from investing in anything else.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >Examples of wasted potential: > Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech payment systems. > James: 3D-printed prosthetic limbs for A-levels. Today? Writing credit risk reports. > Alex: Developed AI drone swarms for disaster relief at 18. Graduated with top honours from Imperial. His job? Tweaking a single button's ergonomics on home appliances. >These aren't outliers. They're a generation of engineering prodigies whose talents are being squandered. Just the opposite can still be like a mirror image :\ When I was younger than that in the land of the dollar bill I had already made millions for our clients in financial services. At the time of course the dollar and the pound sterling were still backed in a non-fiat way at about $2.5/£1 which people could count on for the long term. Once everything went fiat, nobody could afford anything physical like they could before. I didn't get out of high school until after 1971 so it was already far too late. Then I went to the University to study hardware type things so I would have something to sell where concrete value was being added, not merely shuffled around or gradually extracted. The business school had a ridiculous cheating scandal and they weren't as good at math as I would have liked anyway. But manufacturing momentum continued to dwindle with skyrocketing inflation and labor costs. Regardless, I'm still not finished improving my abilities to create and/or make all kinds of things from mechanical hardware, electronics, chemicals and more, but only sold one physical product for a limited number of years in my employers' or my own company, which was a side product within a pure service provider. You can be prepared your whole life and still not get up to launching hardware as easily as you can with something having much less raw material cost. Which is naturally the way it always was, but one day the costs just skyrocketed out of sight and beyond the reach of millions more technologists in a most insidious way, so no more manufacturing for you. And millions is a lot, that grew to include today's big slice containing almost all of the promising creatives who are capable of earth-shaking physical inventions who were fortunately not previously confined to such an exclusive (never be able to afford it again) club. If past progress would have been limited the same way, Bell Labs or NASA could never have even gotten off the ground in the 20th century. Does anybody today have any idea what places like this were supposed to be like in the 21st century? Hint; not less-capable of putting every other contender to shame, and certainly not smaller or non-existent. While still being dwarfed in size by the combined power of industrial research labs supporting domestic manufacturing. I guess it's just remaining momentum continuing to slow from an era that was already bygone before I got out of college. Once inflation kicked in, average people couldn't afford to buy US-made products any more, manufacturers couldn't afford to keep making them, and it never got better. Reagan came along and it got even worse. Remember, the great mothballing of factories in the 20th century is only temporary until the value of the currency in average peoples' pockets comes back :\ If you want to be able to make anything you could possibly need, you need to already be making everything you already need.

sylware 2y ago

Yep, look at RISC-V, the most promising hardware is from the USA. It is not yet on the latest silicon process, but with the latest GPU, I guess we could run the latest games, until the game devs recompile and QA a bit their games (obviously on elf/linux)

jononor 2y ago
Most promising by what definition? And what subset of applications/markets are you considering? In the microcontroller space, China is leading on RISC-V. EspressIf, WCH, et.c are already shipping units at scale. Of course these are low value chips, but the volumes are large. The combined shipments for microcontrollers are in tens of billions of units annually. The technology choices in the space changes slowly (32 bit over 8/16bit is quite recent...), but over the next 10 years RISC-V looks poised to take a decent chunk.
- sylware 2y ago
  Look at risc-v official web site, some company called sifive and their UEFI workstation boards. And I want to be able to buy a USB-C RV64 SOC (without ARM blocks) with tons of GPIOs for my future keyboard controller.

zipy124 2y ago

The largest problem I see is shipping times. If I need to download a new software "part" (library or other), the shipping time is the download time, nearly instant. If I need new hardware pieces, its either next day shipping, a few days by air-freight or three weeks on a boat from china. This limits prototype turnover time, and means iterating quick is much harder. Finally you have the problem that hardware is expensive and an additional cost. A hardware startup has all the same costs as a software company but with the addition of hardware.

tomhoward 2y ago
That’s a big part of it. But mostly it’s that your dev+deploy+evaluate cycle is so much slower. With web software you can write a feature or bug-fix and push to prod in minutes - and repeat that many times a day. With hardware each equivalent cycle is weeks or months (especially in my vertical - farms).
- zipy124 2y ago
  That's what I meant by prototype turnover time, your iteration cycle.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Some of us write software for embedded devices where a mistake in programning means a critical machine in a remote area needs someone to physically go there and thus spend months in test before we dare deploy. Some of us care about quality and won't allow a customer to see bugs thus even though we can deploy in seconds our reputation won't allow it. There is also software that bugs can kill people so again we won't deploy without evtensive testing - much of this is regulated and we would go to prison for deploying at will even if it works. those who work in any of the above react in horror to stories of how the web deploys to production so fast. we know we are not perfect and don't understand how you would risk it.
whiplash451 2y ago
True but that reality applies to all your competitors. Your investors should care about your performance relative to the market.

Folcon 2y ago

Just to chime in and say that bootstrapping does work in this domain, I say that as someone who's had a few friends go down that route, but yes, it's really tough. There's also people I know who built small scale solutions and then managed to push that into funding and funnily enough a Kickstarter as well though I don't think he'd recommend anyone follow that route.

hintymad 2y ago

UK ignited the First Industrial Revolution. It's sad to see that UK has slipped to number 16 or lower when it came to the market share of global manufacturing. And the problem is not to just UK, but to pretty much all the developed countries. Many nations and people have benefited greatly from globalization, but I have to ask: is it worth it if the cost is forfeiting my own country's manufacturing know-how and supply chains? And yes, I'm fully aware of the theory of comparative advantages, but in the meantime, but manufacturing can still bring great income to many families and nations still compete and even go to wars with each other, right?

pjc50 2y ago
Even the Americans can't manage economic isolation. It takes a global civilisation to build a smartphone. We might have been able to get closer to it by being in the EU, but now we're on our own on that one.
- hintymad 2y ago
  Yeah, I do recognize that. I just wish that the US could have a healthy mixture of light and heavy industry, so that the cost building any mission critical systems will not go through the roof, and so that we will be able t build anything domestically if we want. Even though it's likely a pipe dream now, but at least the US can do so for the WW II and after WW II for quite some time.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    That ship sailed. It's like the other comment said - China embraces manufacturing to make other countries inept at it. It's not only that American precision engineering is mostly at parity with China, it's that manufacturing anywhere else is a waste of money. When unibody aluminum Macbook cases are machined, they never are machined in America. They're sold to Americans, marketed as an American company, but your device (even at the markup Apple charges) cannot be made economically in America, period. In a broader sense, I'd say that America is headed down the same road the UK is too. We expect people to pay hand-over-fist for our tech talent that isn't any better than what you can get in Pakistan or China. Our hard markets are getting bearish, our leadership wants to de-globalize, and American tech wants to maintain global control without acquiescing to local governance. America had the economic lead before WWI and after WWII, but now we've bet the farm on our ability to market bullshit. America's national economy cannot survive if the App Store and ChatGPT are our premier exports.

foobarian 2y ago

Would it be fair to say that the "unicorn" effect is a lot harder to achieve as well? If VC rely on 1 out of N startups doing well then that 1 success needs to achieve over N-fold returns just to break even. On the other hand I have no trouble coming up with examples of hardware companies that did well: Apple, Nvidia, Intel... but those time scales are titanic.

rbanffy 2y ago
> Apple, Nvidia, Intel. Not sure they are great examples. Intel is going through a lot of pain now (but it's been very successful in the past). Apple was in a terrible situation before its reverse acquisition by NeXT (NeXT paid one Steve Jobs for all of Apple and got $400 million in change). Nvidia got insanely lucky with Bitcoin, then with AI. Its original plan was to make 3D accelerators for gamers and, maybe, engineering workstations. All of them were a couple wrong decisions away from doom multiple times. Think Commodore, who made one of the most popular computers ever, only to be mismanaged into the ground.
- nradov 2y ago
  Luck and timing obviously play huge roles. But I like to think that as an industry we no longer frequently make mistakes quite as outright stupid as Commodore management did. There are at least some generally understood tech industry best practices which prevent decisions like that when there is serious money at stake.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Nokia enters the chat
BobaFloutist 2y ago
It's funny that you didn't mention Dell, Lenovo, Sony, or even Microsoft and Nintendo which both make their money off the software than the hardware, but are also companies that produce and selling hardware.

rbanffy 2y ago

> That’s not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can pull off, anywhere. The UK, with a comprehensive social safety net, should be more willing to take small risks. I know it's now what happens, but it'd be important to understand why something that should be actually isn't.

varispeed 2y ago
What safety net? UK does not have a safety net.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  That's fair. UC and the NHS are far from ideal, but, compared to the US, they are heaven.
  - kristianc 2y ago
    I think that needs to be qualified heavily — salaries in the UK are much lower both in nominal and PPP terms, so there's much less opportunity to build one's own safety net, and the NHS is overwhelmingly focused on providing care for the elderly. To a young(ish) startup founder, the presence of the NHS and UC makes little to no difference.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Maybe a good way to incentivize more risky entrepreneurs is to provide a better safety net. I would, however, caution against making it too perfect (and I hate myself for saying that, because I would prefer people worked on whatever brings them happiness, not money) - part of the drive for Americans (and the reason they risk so much on it) is the need to accumulate as much capital as possible as soon as possible, because they know they won't enjoy any sort of safety net when they grow old.
      - kristianc 2y ago
        Let me rephrase — in the UK we have a generous and expanding safety net, for the elderly, voted for by the elderly, and paid for at great expense by the working population.

DrScientist 2y ago

Interested in your opinion on crowd-funding as a way of raising initial capital - ie cut out professional investors and go direct to potential customers?

tomhoward 2y ago
I've seen it work once, but it was hard over the long term: LIFX (smart light globes) [1], which was launched on Kickstarter in 2012 by people working from the same co-working space and accelerator I was involved with then (so I kinda had a backstage view on it). Products like that work if there's natural consumer appeal built into the product, that you can convey in a video that gets people excited imagining how much better their life would be. That's what motivates pre-purchasing and also sharing/virality. That's why the LIFX Kickstarter campaign worked. But even with the $1.3M crowdfunding, they needed a lot more funds from investors; the crowdfunding just helped with initial funding and to prove demand. Still, that company didn't turn out to be a big success. It was hard/slow to get the product into production and shipped to consumers – it took 2-3 years I think. Established lighting vendors like Phillips were quick to get competing products into major retail stores. Along the way the company seemed to have a lot of internal drama, and investors became disenchanted. The company was acquired in about 2019 [2], then that company went bust, then the LIFX assets were acquired again in 2022 [3]. So, from its early signs of huge potential success, it ends up being a cautionary tale and another case study that investors can look at as a reason not to invest in hardware startups. Another cautionary tale is the "Coolest Cooler" [4], which ended up in a lawsuit [5]. I heard someone mention that a factory they engaged in China held them to ransom (staff went "on strike" in the middle of production) but I don't know details beyond what's been reported. These cases demonstrate all the ways these kinds of projects can go wrong, and are much harder to turn around than a software project in which you can be building your product to maintain customer satisfaction and growth day-by-day. And even still, this approach only works for gimmicky consumer products, not B2B products that are more likely to work commercially in the long term. Edit: Also remember Pebble (watch) which was a huge Kickstarter hit and seemed like a successful company for a few years after that, then suddenly went bust. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollieslade/2013/12/11/eureka-how-lifx-raised-1-3-million-on-kickstarter-in-3-days-and-reinvented-the-lightbulb/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollieslade/2013/12/11/eureka-h... [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/building-energy-monitoring-company-buddy-acquire-smart-light-startup-lifx/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/building-energy-monitoring-com... [3] https://www.techhive.com/article/827458/lifx-smart-light-brand-has-a-new-owner.html https://www.techhive.com/article/827458/lifx-smart-light-bra... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/meta_the_massive_failure_of_the_coolest_cooler/ https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/... [5] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/meta_the_massive_failure_of_the_coolest_cooler/?rdt=46540 https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/...

momojo 2y ago

What are your thoughts on Anduril?

tomhoward 2y ago
The founder was already super rich and proven. I don't know much about the details about how it got started (i.e., how much Palmer Luckey self-funded it in the early stages) but the fact that he'd already built/sold Oculus was always going to make it easier to open doors and close funding deals (even if the politics/FB drama was a complication). Also, building tech for the US military has some advantages. You have one customer with very high stakes and very deep pockets. Obviously it's hard to get started and you need to be building something that's uniquely useful and valuable for defence purposes, but once you achieve that, once you're in the door of the military industry, you're on pretty solid ground, and that's attractive to investors. The one hardware company i know in Australia that's doing well is also making defence tech. It's much harder if all your potential customers (in my case, farmers) are small family businesses spread thinly in non-urban areas all over the world. Investors know that makes distrubuition much more challenging.

NickC25 2y ago

>I’ve had plenty of early success and validation of all my market theses, but it’s super hard to get any investors interested. Plenty say “exciting” and want to chat. All lose interest when you start talking funding needs and path to market. I started a non-tech food product company, and have found the exact same thing to be true in my line of work. It's odd. Here's a conversation I recently had with a potential investor. "You've got a years worth of sales to convince me you have found ideal PMF?" Yes. "You've found the resources you need to scale to the degree that I'd get a good return if sales continue to grow?" Yes. "You've built a small team with some industry vets, and have some great talent on your advisory board who know the ups and downs of building a brand and product in your chosen space?" Yes. "You've boostrapped your way to $100k in revenue, have developed a cult-like following in your local market and are seeking a small amount to be able to grow the product to a state-wide or nation-wide scale?" Yes. "How much do are you looking to raise?" Not a lot by modern standards. A million dollars would last us several years "Why should I invest in you? Your industry's traditional exit valuation isn't triple digit. Sorry" Why the fuck did you come to me and ask for this meeting? >In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy SaaS wins over the past decade, and that’s all that most investors are willing to even consider. This needs to be echoed from the rooftops. And seen by a whole bunch of investors/VCs whose hubris has prevented them from investing in anything else.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
>Examples of wasted potential: > Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech payment systems. > James: 3D-printed prosthetic limbs for A-levels. Today? Writing credit risk reports. > Alex: Developed AI drone swarms for disaster relief at 18. Graduated with top honours from Imperial. His job? Tweaking a single button's ergonomics on home appliances. >These aren't outliers. They're a generation of engineering prodigies whose talents are being squandered. Just the opposite can still be like a mirror image :\ When I was younger than that in the land of the dollar bill I had already made millions for our clients in financial services. At the time of course the dollar and the pound sterling were still backed in a non-fiat way at about $2.5/£1 which people could count on for the long term. Once everything went fiat, nobody could afford anything physical like they could before. I didn't get out of high school until after 1971 so it was already far too late. Then I went to the University to study hardware type things so I would have something to sell where concrete value was being added, not merely shuffled around or gradually extracted. The business school had a ridiculous cheating scandal and they weren't as good at math as I would have liked anyway. But manufacturing momentum continued to dwindle with skyrocketing inflation and labor costs. Regardless, I'm still not finished improving my abilities to create and/or make all kinds of things from mechanical hardware, electronics, chemicals and more, but only sold one physical product for a limited number of years in my employers' or my own company, which was a side product within a pure service provider. You can be prepared your whole life and still not get up to launching hardware as easily as you can with something having much less raw material cost. Which is naturally the way it always was, but one day the costs just skyrocketed out of sight and beyond the reach of millions more technologists in a most insidious way, so no more manufacturing for you. And millions is a lot, that grew to include today's big slice containing almost all of the promising creatives who are capable of earth-shaking physical inventions who were fortunately not previously confined to such an exclusive (never be able to afford it again) club. If past progress would have been limited the same way, Bell Labs or NASA could never have even gotten off the ground in the 20th century. Does anybody today have any idea what places like this were supposed to be like in the 21st century? Hint; not less-capable of putting every other contender to shame, and certainly not smaller or non-existent. While still being dwarfed in size by the combined power of industrial research labs supporting domestic manufacturing. I guess it's just remaining momentum continuing to slow from an era that was already bygone before I got out of college. Once inflation kicked in, average people couldn't afford to buy US-made products any more, manufacturers couldn't afford to keep making them, and it never got better. Reagan came along and it got even worse. Remember, the great mothballing of factories in the 20th century is only temporary until the value of the currency in average peoples' pockets comes back :\ If you want to be able to make anything you could possibly need, you need to already be making everything you already need.