venturecapital

Founders

Hardware is really hard. 

My first VC backed startup in 2017 was a BCI or « brain computer interface » as a music headset - paired with an app that let you gave music recommendations to put you in a « the zone »

I lived in Shenzen china for few months trying to get a prototype of the ground - lost all the money on R&D even if using all the latest 3D printing techniques and being upstream in the supply chain - coupled with customer acquisition costs for crowdfunding etc it was dead in the waters.

In software you get dozen shots on goal and need 10 years to build really good products. In hardware you might get 3 shots and need over 20 years.

 Excited to see more people try though !

Does hardware require a different financing vehicle than VC?

Building something new. Host: /venturecapital /adventures /theitinerant

Investing in Space & Deep tech with sustainable models for humanity. Advisor for ASRI Space & Space Babies research 
Classic cars & VR nerd 😎

Yeah, this one is tricky. I’m looking at a PE play now in acquiring a public manufacturing company & bringing in startup/venture building services & HW products bringing in revenue from day 1 through the parent company. I’m exploring fundraising & listing on a stronger exchange to do so as there’s more access through capital markets, money markets, OTC, bond markets. I just figured, hey I have access to retired bankers who like to have fun with creative finance so why not give it a go? 

Instead of investing, my plan is to drive revenue direct - cutting out initial needs for sales/marketing teams to get products developed.

my 2 cents - I think it depends on the ambition being undertaken. Maybe not a different vehicle than VC, but VC’s calibrated to hardware lifecycles and ecosystems.

Seems there is a large gap between novel “invention” versus leveraging existing hardware in new ways. 

For example:
Neuralink ≠ Humane AI

Feels like tech/investor culture over indexed on software and we’re starting to see the swing back toward atoms in the last couple years.

Follow to get the best of Farcaster using @mbd - AI Recommendation Engine for Web3. @a16zcrypto css23. Ex-ML Lead @Chainlink. Ex-Sr Data Scientist @AWS.

Not sure what country you’re in but the U.S. invests billions per year, they just do it by contracting with private sector actors.

probably, Entrepreneurial States. I think it is one of the only areas where I would like to see goverments step up more to take in risk at early stages vs private sector.