Founders

Spent the weekend talking to dozens of founders at YC alumni reunions and realized that we’re in the middle of an inflection for hard-tech companies. (10% of the recent batch of 240 startups are in hard-tech)

Sharing some thoughts on why this is happening below ⬇️

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 !

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.

The first prototype was based on one of the earliest OpenBCI kits! I still have hope I will come back to that projects but the bottlenecks where around non-intrusive electrodes on hair / crane. I think the way to go was using wearables on the neck or hand like ctrl-labs did (bought by FB and now probably part of the AR/glass kit).

Did you ever publish your designs? I might be misremembering, but IIRC OpenBCI has a pretty strong community of people tinkering with stuff like that, and lots of cool projects have come out of that work. I'd love to hear your take on that sort of thing.

Reax to this? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/25/you-should-be-working-on-hardware/