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?

Healthcare investor by day, web3/AI tinkerer by night. 🟪 Host: /venturecapital /theitinerant

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.