Into The Forge

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Season 2 Episode 7, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Josh Ouellette, co-founder and CEO, and Randy Shults, another co-founder of RavenOps, a Lemnos portfolio company. RavenOps takes inspiration from nature to build cooperative swarms of simple robots that outperform individual units in complex environments.

Josh: It really goes back to undergrad for me. My focus at MIT was on aerospace control systems. Which I really liked because I’ve always liked software, but at the same time there’s this kind of magical moment that happens in controls, where I’ve got this lifeless block of motors, actuators, and sensors. Then you throw the switch, and the control system kicks in. As a company, we’re focused on swarm robotics, of multiple units working together, which we call “heterogeneous multi-unit robotic systems.” That same thing takes place again, but now at the systems level. So it’s not just one robot coming to life; it’s all of these robots in a dynamic system.

Randy: This was the first time in hardware. One of the scariest tasks we needed to tackle was trying to form a hardware startup. But that’s actually where swarm really plays into this. Instead of building a much more complex mechanical engineering system, we’re going all the way to a bayesian dynamic system. With swarm, we’re able to use off-the-shelf robotics, build in our own sensors, and turn this back into a software dynamics problem of how to interact between the different robots. So we’re much more into what traditionally has been our sweet spot.

Josh: I spent 11 and a half years prior to doing this in the Air Force, flying V-22 Ospreys and doing special operations in that aircraft. You have this weird relationship with a flight control computer—when you as the pilot are asking the airplane to do something, and it will either do it or not do it based on its own conditions and its own interpretation. And so, when our drones are flying around and they’re making all these autonomous decisions, it’s always in the back of my head, “What would it be like if I was actually sitting in the middle of that thing?” Because that’s the world I lived in.

Josh: When we were looking at oil and gas and some of these heavier industrial applications, we had this rule: we wanted to switch from us pushing toward customers, to receiving pulls from customers. We weren’t originally looking at this internal space, where we actually go inside of their equipment and do these inside-out inspections. Customers were telling us that. And what we noticed was, when we finally picked up on that signal, and pitched that back to customers, they said, “I need to get you to talk to so-and-so and so-and-so, because this is big.”

Randy: Through our early growth, we kept entering and leaving these expansionary and contractionary phases. You have this core idea, but as you’re trying to solve the problem, you’re coming up with three, five, 10 different possible solutions that could all be applicable. So, the expansionary period would be always where we would

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Season 2 Episode 6, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Sébastien Boyer and Thomas Palomares, co-founders of FarmWise, a Lemnos portfolio company that recently announced a $5.7 million Seed Round raise.

Thomas: When we finished our graduate studies, we were interested in ways that computer vision and natural learning could improve people’s lives. My grandparents were farmers, so it has always been a field in which I was really interested. We started to talk a lot of farmers, understand their daily problems and what were the issues preventing them from going fully organic. We realized they were using a lot of pesticides because they didn’t have a better solution or because it was a very harsh process to do manually. We felt like we could come up with a way of making their job easier and moving them to a more sustainable way of farming.

Sébastien: Both Thomas and I, we define ourselves as software guys, so we’ve actually never really worked on hardware before. We’ve played with some Legos and we’ve built a few pieces of furniture, but really, this was our first serious hardware project. Interestingly, it was also our first startup.

Thomas: The long-term vision of our project is to automate pretty much everything from seeding to harvesting. Obviously, as a startup, we want to start very focused, so we started with the weeding process.

Sébastien: Currently the two main ways farmers are dealing with weeds in the field is either by spraying herbicides throughout the field or by hiring people to go out there and use very basic tools. We are basically providing an alternative to those processes.

Sébastien: As pretty young entrepreneurs, surrounding ourselves with experienced and talented people was very instrumental. As soon as we graduated, we joined an accelerator program in the Valley, which was a very good program and well connected and helped us get in touch with a lot of mentors—both technical mentors and business-oriented mentors. Obviously not everyone is interested or excited about what you’re doing, but you just need a couple of people to be excited enough to really push you through this first hurdle of trying to build this network. Now we’re very lucky to be working with five official mentors—purely technical people with experience building products, but also people coming from the farming industry and business people with experience in other industries.

Sébastien: At the very beginning, the reason why we choose this accelerator was for the network. We were very honest with ourselves about being young, international founders. So obviously, our network at the very beginning was close to zero. Choosing an accelerator that’s actually in San Francisco and has a reputation for being well connected was instrumental for us. We had come from software background, so we wanted to surround ourselves as soon as possible with people with experience building hardware products and hardware companies. Lemnos was, by reputation in the Valley, one of

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Season 2 Episode 5, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Dave Merrill, CEO and Clint Cope, co-founder of Elroy Air, a Lemnos portfolio company. Elroy Air recently announced that it had secured $4.6 million in seed funding to develop its large autonomous cargo delivery aircraft.

Dave: We are a transportation company in the aerospace space. We are developing a system to carry goods, to carry cargo by air over hundreds of miles. Clint and I realized it could be done and that it could change the world if it was done, and that we were uniquely suited to do it. That was so exciting that we just got started immediately.

Dave: I was at Stanford doing symbolic systems, then I did a Master’s in Computer Science, then went to the MIT Media Lab, and basically fell in love with hardware. I grew up building physical things, like woodworking and building things out of metal. When I discovered electronics and hardware, it was this amazing fusion of my interests in software with building physical stuff. I never really looked back.

Clint: I think I always had like a pretty natural mechanical curiosity and an aptitude toward that. It probably started with radio-controlled cars. I would be hacking parts and moving them back and forth in-between kits. But I think the moment that my parents knew that I was going be involved in hardware was the day my father and my grandfather were struggling to install a hanging toaster in our kitchen, and they tried every which way possible. They were about to put it back in the box, when I grabbed my grandfather and said, “The bracket’s on backward, Grandpa.” Sure enough, Dad and Grandpa turned the bracket around, and the toaster fit.

Dave: We both became very interested and experienced in building things that fly, and realized, “Hey, there seems to be a lot of noise and a lot of competition at the small scale, like the small camera drones, small delivery drones scale, but it seems like there are opportunities to make something bigger and useful that nobody’s doing yet at a larger scale.” So that’s where we got excited and started working on Elroy Air.

Dave: At Elroy we have a handful of advisors that we call upon them when we need their input, and it’s been really helpful. We’re an aerospace company and a transportation company. Right now we’re in our prototype phase and our seed phase. So we’ve gone a little heavier on business and technical advisors, but I think over time we’re very likely to have some key advisors, or even board members, that come out of big aerospace.

Dave: Lemnos is awesome. I met Jeremy when Lemnos was just starting. So, when I was leaving 3D Robotics, I think you mentioned, “Hey, you want to come and be an Entrepreneur in Residence with us?” That seemed like a great next step,

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Season 2 Episode 4, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Amir Hirsch, co-founder and CEO of Flybrix, a Lemnos portfolio company.

We started thinking about building flying cameras. This was 2014. There was a lot of hype around drones at the time. So I entered into the drone space, intrigued by the opportunity first to make flying cameras, but secondly to explore pocketable designs and industrial designs that allow a drone to fold up. In that process, we were using Lego bricks for prototyping. We 3D printed these little connectors to hold the motor onto a Lego brick, and we were using the Legos as part of our way of exploring different industrial design options. We realized that we were sitting on top of a pretty cool product idea, and we decided that we would take that to market.

Before this startup, I worked for my co-founder Robb Walters, who started a company called Integrated Plasmonics. We were developing a small spectroscopy device towards the blood testing market, which we learned was probably not the best market to target. There was a lot of regulation to get to that market. But we learned a lot in the process about prototyping hardware: how much things cost and how far out your expectations are from reality. Before that, I had also worked on a nuclear power plant controller. I had built some high-end computing systems. My background is in electrical engineering. So I knew how, especially with the nuclear reactor, important it is to have really validated designs before you start to make it for a product.

It’s important to ask your colleagues and friends. Talking with a lot of people early on, especially Eric and Jeremy at Lemnos, really helped me figure out what the right thing to do at the right time was. It also helps to talk to investors about what they are seeing. So it wasn’t just my friends who were saying that that sounds like a sensible idea, because investors know what’s coming on the edge of technology. Then you can figure out what thing you might be able to get traction on within the broader community of investors.

Jeremy is one of my best friends; I’ve known him since MIT. I am the original Lemnos fanboy right here. I wanted to go through the program. I wanted to be part of this community and be able to see a lot of innovative technology happen up close. I think Lemnos’s strong suit is being able to pick founders who will make real technology. I’m really impressed with the technical skill in this building, and I would say that for anyone who is a serious electrical engineer or mechanical engineer interested in hardware, that Lemnos is the best place to go. I fantasize about working for half of the other companies at Lemnos.

The most important thing we’ve figured out is how to do prototyping. There are a number of different services where we can get boards made at different time lines. There are fast turn things in this city that will give us a board in three day

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Season 2 Episode 3, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Jon Hollander, CEO, and Eric Gregory, VP of Engineering, of Seriforge, a Lemnos portfolio company.

Jon: My process was kind of unusual. I was at an art exhibition on mathematical knitting. This mathematician, she had knitted these incredible three-dimensional shapes out of yarn, Klein bottles, Möbius strips, all these really complicated three-dimensional curved manifolds. I thought that she had just reprogrammed this machine that they used to make fighter planes or racecars and just reprogrammed it to make these mathematical sculptures. I was talking to the artist and she’s like, “No, I did these all by hand. I think everything like that is made by hand, to be honest.”

I didn’t believe her. I didn’t really know too much about the field, so I went online and started looking for a YouTube video of this mysterious machine that was being used to make all these carbon fiber parts. It didn’t exist. It was General Electric making fan blades by hand—1,700 pieces of carbon fiber, 300+ hours to make these fan blades. I thought, “This is insane. This is a 21st century material. You’re literally making things that go into space and you’re doing it using the same skill set as 19th century, pre-industrial revolution craftspeople!” Where are the machines that they use to make these composite parts? I thought, “This would be an interesting problem to crack.”

Jon: Growing up, my family had a small aluminum foundry, so it was aluminum die casting, giant presses and furnaces in a machine shop. I grew up around machine tools and factory manufacturing processes, at least on the metal working side. We were always mechanically facile. I studied electrical engineering in college, and I went to law school as well. But I always like building stuff on the side. I bought a CNC mill and made widgets and things on the side just for fun.

Eric: Like Jon, always a tinkerer. Always built a lot of small things, mostly electronics. I tinkered a lot. Even my background formally is software. I’ve always dealt in the hardware/software realm.

Eric: When Jon started down this process, I kind of watched from the sidelines. I was really intrigued. It was in early 2014, when he called me and said, “I need to show you what I’m working on.” He showed me the CAD models of this machine. I said, “God, does this really work?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “That’s fantastic. This is something I would leave my job over.” Through that year, we worked on the idea together. We actually dove into the business because we really wanted to understand the market and make sure we weren’t creating a technology that didn’t have a place. We convinced ourselves that there was a real need for this. And by fall, I said, “I need to do this,” left my job, joined Jon, and we founded the company.

Eric: Fortunately, we have good

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Season 2 Episode 2, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Kavodel Ohiomoba and Andy Kittler, co-founders of FieldVision, a Lemnos portfolio company that builds an autonomous camera that automatically films any team sport.

Kav: My background was in sports and tech. After I graduated from college, I worked for a company that built a sort of “Moneyball” for various NBA teams. Our first client was the Golden State Warriors, and they have this unique blend of cameras. Those cameras track the XY coordinates of every player and the XYZ of the ball. I took that data set and said, “When Stephen Curry goes left of the ball screen, here’s what he scores, and when the Warriors run a small small with Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, here’s what they do”. That was my foray into computer vision and technology. After that, I had this idea to bring that down to the youth level. The only way to do it was hardware and here we are.

Kav: Never an official hardware product. I bought Zigbee components, took them out to a field, and tried to use the Zigbee protocol to figure out locational data based on where I was. I tinkered with things and played around with various hardware stacks, but never even thought about fully building a hardware drive before this.

Andy: As a kid, I kind of built my own desktop and did some of those various weekend trips to RadioShack—just building kind of random stuff. I also had some experience at a hardware-software company called Theatro, which I helped start. We built a communication device for retail store associates, but I really didn’t have exposure to the hardware side of that development process.

Andy: I had been working at various startups and also been a coach for both youth and college lacrosse. When Kav started to speak to me about what was possible with computer vision, how we could build this camera, and what we could do with it, I immediately knew from coaching that there would be a huge impact on what coaches would be able to do for the teams in terms of development. But I also knew that there would be a lot of use for parents.

Andy: We’ve worked really hard to build an advisory team where that has a deep set of experience in cameras, hardware, and manufacturing, which also includes Lemnos. Part of what led us here is that we knew that we wanted to fill that founding team gap with some deep experience. I’ve built out a bench that we feel like does that.

Kav: We have a set of advisors that we essentially approach every month or two, give them a pitch, tell them the story, and give the update around where we currently are. For us that’s been an incredible way to test our thesis and to validate our thinking and to incorporate feedback. We found folks who like sports, who are interested in the product natively. Our most key advisors, the Dean of Engineering at Wash U, started three or four computer vision companies, and he used to work for the New England Patriots. So he had this natural affinity to the idea and was more tha

Welcome to Season 2!

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Season 2 Episode 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein talks with Noah Ready-Campbell of Built Robotics, a Lemnos portfolio company. Built recently announced $15 million in Series A funding to get its autonomous track loader to market.

I grew up in rural Vermont and worked for my dad pretty much every summer. I did a lot manual labor, construction, carpentry, and carpenter’s assistant kind of work. When I was thinking about robotics, I thought, “Maybe there’s a way to bring robotics into construction in some way, shape, or form.” In our vision for the company, we automate heavy equipment to make construction safer, faster, and more affordable.

No, we first came up with this idea for an e-commerce business. It was called Twice, and the idea was basically to be an online secondhand clothing store. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, it was clear to me that I really wanted a business where technology was the core. I decided that robotics was the one for me because it felt like it was maybe a little bit further outside of Google’s sweet spot. I’d studied Computer Science in school and got a Master’s as well, but I’d never done anything in robotics. I just started learning. I probably spent six months just reading about robotics, talking to people, and then refreshing myself on “Oh, yeah. That’s how an electric motor works.” I was definitely intimidated by hardware at first. The thing I realized is that for most hardware businesses, the core of what they’re doing is actually still software.

I really needed to, again, roll up my sleeves. My parents live in rural Vermont. I rented a 15-ton John Deere excavator, and I said “Hey, mom. You’ve always said you wanted to have a pond. I’m going to dig you a pond.” So I spent a week on this machine. I put 77 hours on it. I started to understand what are the areas where a robot could be helpful. Then I traveled around the country talking to every excavation contractor that I even tangentially knew—a lot of like uncles, fathers-in-law, and friends of mine. I got a lot of really good feedback.

I think there are two dimensions. One is industry expertise. For us, that’s hardware, robotics, perception software, construction, excavation, etc. Then there’s general company-building stuff, which is how you run a fundraising process, what are the legal ins and outs here, etc. I think that since I had done another company before, I felt a little bit more comfortable in the general company-building stuff, but I had a lot to learn on the robotics side of things. That’s actually one of the big reasons I wanted to work with Lemnos. You’ve got a reputation as being the hardware seed stage fund in Silicon Valley. I wanted to work with you so that I could kind of see around corners based on the pattern recognition that you guys have.

The Forge that you have at Lemnos, it’s a litt

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere later this month!

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 9 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Shireen Yates and Scott Sundvor of Nima, formerly 6SensorLabs, a Lemnos portfolio company.

Shireen: It really started with a personal issue of mine. I had suffered for a number of years from not being able to eat out without getting sick. I had severe food allergies, and gluten, specifically, was the most intense. I had always gone out, lived a pretty social life, and then I got diagnosed in college. It completely changed my life to lead a diet-restricted lifestyle. Once I found out what I was actually allergic to, it was very hard to avoid some of those foods while eating in social situations. So, I had this issue and put up with getting sick. I met a lot of people who also had the similar issues. Then I had the great privilege of meeting Scott at MIT, and we had a shared passion about helping people live healthier lives.

Scott: My education was in mechanical engineering. I think that definitely helped a lot. It gave me a great insight into the product development process. That’s something that they really drill into you at MIT. When I met Shireen, I was working in consulting after I got my mechanical engineering degree.

Shireen: I have a background in online sales and marketing—as far out as you can get from hardware. When Scott and I actually got together at MIT to start building this product, my expectations were absurd. Scott had a lot of education to do that summer, but I sat down with Scott and the engineering team at MIT and said, “Okay guys, we have four weeks to prototype, so I expect to have beta users at the end of these four weeks.” We had absolutely nothing at that time. It was just an idea, and our product is complicated.

Scott: It was a lot of fun working with those extreme expectations. It was also definitely a learning process for me. I thought things would go a lot more quickly, and cost a lot less money than you realize that they do. One of the great things about working with someone who is so far removed from hardware is that you have this constant tension. It really pushes the engineering team.

Shireen: I’m going to surprise you; I was a total maker. I remember in middle school, I took a straw, drilled a hole in my toothbrush, and filled it with toothpaste. Then I drilled a hole in the bristles. My mom was like, “You know, those toothbrushes exist.” But I was like, “No, look. I’ve, simplified it.”

Scott: I guess Shireen and I had similar childhoods, because I did a lot the same stuff. I think my first introduction to engineering was probably through Legos. I was always taking things apart. Before you had the remote controls for your light and your fan, I made a whole pulley system in my room for that. It progressed naturally to taking physics classes in high school, and then going to MIT and being a mechanical engineer.

Shireen: No day is the same. But, typically, we have a mix of making sure that we’re on track wit

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere later this month!

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 9 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Shireen Yates and Scott Sundvor of Nima, formerly 6SensorLabs, a Lemnos portfolio company.

Shireen: It really started with a personal issue of mine. I had suffered for a number of years from not being able to eat out without getting sick. I had severe food allergies, and gluten, specifically, was the most intense. I had always gone out, lived a pretty social life, and then I got diagnosed in college. It completely changed my life to lead a diet-restricted lifestyle. Once I found out what I was actually allergic to, it was very hard to avoid some of those foods while eating in social situations. So, I had this issue and put up with getting sick. I met a lot of people who also had the similar issues. Then I had the great privilege of meeting Scott at MIT, and we had a shared passion about helping people live healthier lives.

Scott: My education was in mechanical engineering. I think that definitely helped a lot. It gave me a great insight into the product development process. That’s something that they really drill into you at MIT. When I met Shireen, I was working in consulting after I got my mechanical engineering degree.

Shireen: I have a background in online sales and marketing—as far out as you can get from hardware. When Scott and I actually got together at MIT to start building this product, my expectations were absurd. Scott had a lot of education to do that summer, but I sat down with Scott and the engineering team at MIT and said, “Okay guys, we have four weeks to prototype, so I expect to have beta users at the end of these four weeks.” We had absolutely nothing at that time. It was just an idea, and our product is complicated.

Scott: It was a lot of fun working with those extreme expectations. It was also definitely a learning process for me. I thought things would go a lot more quickly, and cost a lot less money than you realize that they do. One of the great things about working with someone who is so far removed from hardware is that you have this constant tension. It really pushes the engineering team.

Shireen: I’m going to surprise you; I was a total maker. I remember in middle school, I took a straw, drilled a hole in my toothbrush, and filled it with toothpaste. Then I drilled a hole in the bristles. My mom was like, “You know, those toothbrushes exist.” But I was like, “No, look. I’ve, simplified it.”

Scott: I guess Shireen and I had similar childhoods, because I did a lot the same stuff. I think my first introduction to engineering was probably through Legos. I was always taking things apart. Before you had the remote controls for your light and your fan, I made a whole pulley system in my room for that. It progressed naturally to taking physics classes in high school, and then going to MIT and being a mechanical engineer.

Shireen: No day is the same. But, typically, we have a mix of making sure that we’re on track wit

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere in November!

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 8 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Adam Ellsworth, founder of 8-Bit Lit.

About two years ago, a friend and I were discussing an idea for a touch-sensitive lamp for his two-year-old son. We came up with the idea of the question mark from Super Mario Bros. We made one for ourselves. We used TechShop, which has a lot of tools that you can prototype with: laser cutters, CNC mills, etc. We threw it up on Etsy, not really thinking much about it, but it got a ton of blog attention. We got a large number of orders right away. We made 1,000 of them at home in San Francisco, by hand, over three months. That actually turned out to be a helpful experience for production later because I really understood what it was like to set up a production line, to have to try to establish efficiencies, and to work through the line.

I did a program through Singularity University, and Autodesk, one of the big sponsors, had an innovation lab with a 3D printer. I actually designed an SU ring for the class, then printed it out and could wear it right away. That process of going from idea to creation was one of the first sparks that led me to this point.

Yes. I spent a lot of time at TechShop, which is a community workspace that’s like a gym. You pay a membership fee, but instead of barbells and machines, there are CNC mills, laser cutters, 3D printers, and prototyping tools to make a hardware product or furniture. There, I worked as a consultant for different startups, prototyping their hardware for them—just learning the tools day-by-day. Before that, I also built 3D printers for a company, and that was the first time I really honed my chops in the hardware world.

My days have been in waves. There are times when it’s just sprints all the time, and then there are lulls, when it’s like, okay, what’s the next step, what are the next stages?

A few months ago, my days were crazy because we decided to do all the fulfillment for our product ourselves. At this point, it’s in a bit of a lull, which is nice, but I also have to talk with the team in China. So most of my evenings between 6:00 and 8:00, or 9:00 and 11:00 are taken up with meetings.

The most difficult moment was actually launching the crowdfunding campaign because it was first time that I’d ever been responsible to thousands of people. It was higher stress than I had experienced before.

We ran a Kickstarter campaign because we realized our margins were just too low, with getting materials locally, going on Digi-Key, and also paying people a fair San Francisco salary. We couldn’t even offer wholesale because people were looking for 50% off, and we just couldn’t do it. So we decided to shut down and say we probably need to go to China or at least do a larger-scale manufacturing, which led us to Kickstarter. But even before Kickstarter, we started working with a man