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 Episode 6 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with interviewing John Stanfield, the co-founder and CEO of Local Motion, which was acquired by Zipcar.

Clement and I co-founded Local Motion in 2010, just out of Stanford. I came out of a product design program there in the mechanical engineering group and Clement was MS&E (Management, Science, and Engineering). We had an idea to try and solve local mobility by building a four-wheeled plug-in electric vehicle that was designed from the ground up to share—something that was designed to be sold to places and not people and really focus on the local sharing of mobility. What we found after about two years was that our real true value in the marketplace was to offer that sharing ability to existing infrastructures. We separated the vehicle from a small piece of hardware and software platform that we now sell to large fleets across the United States and Europe.

I have a bit of a unique history. I studied Physics in undergrad and didn’t want to build bombs for the Navy. I continued doing my college job, which was wild firefighting. I did that for 12 years, rappelled down helicopters, sawed down trees on fire, and had a great time. But then, I came to Silicon Valley after starting a high-rise window cleaning service-based business in San Francisco, growing that to about 12 times its annual revenue, and selling it back to the original founder. I came down to Silicon Valley and got into Stanford for my graduate work and that’s where I met Clement.

I’ve always been an innovator, a creator, and a builder. I’ve always created things from furniture to two-wheeled electric vehicles in my garage. I started a vegetable oil conversion business in Los Angeles to take any diesel motor and allow it to run on waste vegetable oil. I invented some technology, started a company, and started realizing very quickly that the waste vegetable market is basically a commodities market and it’s very difficult to penetrate.

For me, right now, it’s all about just finding efficiencies and shifting between my multiple hats. Generally, in the morning, I come in and try to make sure there are no major problems with our existing platform. That’s checking in with the engineering teams that are working on customer satisfaction to backend software. I’m also basically the hiring manager, and I handle the finances, so I make sure that everything’s in order on the finance side. But the biggest part of my job right now is actually product development on our physical product, the user interface at the cars.

Hiring salespeople is the hardest thing that I have done to date. I would much rather solve a complex mechanism or a technical problem. I really had to learn how to hire sales and marketing people because I’ve never done it before. I had to create a way that I could look at sales roles and sales hiring from a technical perspective. We had to come up with a real, concrete solution-based set of questions.

Jeremy and Helen. I really love their vision. You have to fund your company; you have to take the money even

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 5 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Cheryl Kellond, founder and CEO of Bia, a former Lemnos portfolio company.

I am the classic late blooming adult-onset athlete. I was approaching my 40th birthday. I was in a rut, and a friend convinced me to do a triathlon. I had never run before. I barely swam before. I was not an athlete, but I fell in love with the sport. As I progressed in my abilities, I was looking for gear. I was looking for a training watch and an online training site that met my needs. I tried everything on the market and quickly came to the conclusion that they all sucked. They hurt my wrist to wear. They didn’t do what I needed. I mean, I’m an MIT grad, and when I have to crack open an instruction manual to learn a sports watch, you’ve got to be kidding me. I thought, “Gosh, we could solve this problem better.”

I had a marketing background. I clearly knew my target market. I have to say, even if I had been a long-term hardware person at a big company, I don’t think very much of that would have prepared me for what we had to go through as a new company.

I was the girl in high school that was really good at math and science, but at a certain point, it was more important for me to have a cute perm and go to the prom, so I didn’t pursue that in college like I should have. I kick myself for it because I’ve always been technically inclined. I pick it up really easily. There were times on this project when I wish I could have done more, but there are times that I impressed the hell out my team by learning stuff.

My day is a delicious blend of talking to VCs, negotiating home marketing deals, working with press and prominent athletes, and doing first line customer support. I get the hot swap list, so if anything is wrong in the field, I get it emailed to me. I print the shipping label, print the stamps.com label, and order the supplies from Uline. Then first round product testing on new features comes through me first because I’m the “athlete” on the team. If there’s a new pace smoothing algorithm, guess who’s got to get her butt out of bed and go do a six-mile run with three watches on her wrist?

The hardest part up until a few weeks ago was knowing that I made a commitment to these 2,500 customers that believed in us so deeply and spent their social capital and their money on us. Up until the moment it ships, you’re not really sure it’s going to ship. We had some big manufacturing problems as early as December, when we were like, “Oh, crap.” There’s that responsibility that I think weighs on you.

On the backend, now that we’re shipping, it’s just more expensive to make things better and fix problems—everything costs money. I can’t ship a product without paying for a mailing label. The financial hurdle is a little bit higher.

I was like, “Dude, Helen and Jeremy are on the phone offering me money. Sweet. I could take more money.” It was the best decision I have made. Having other hardware founders around going through the same struggles a

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 4 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Art Tkachenko, co-Founder of Pantry, a former Lemnos portfolio company.

I realized there was such a tremendous potential in RFID (radio frequency identification) and it was underutilized due to, I thought, an incorrect way of deploying the technology and taking advantage of the technology. At one point, in my free time, I came across an article saying that a big part of grocery sales for grocery stores comes from selling only 90 SKUs or 90 different products. While if you go to Safeway there’s 30,000 SKUs.

I thought, “Why can’t I just go to my lobby and get [my groceries]?” I live in an apartment complex in the city. It’s a very busy commute to get to any grocery store; it takes me half an hour. So I realized that this could be done and we could have food available at the places we spend most of our time, and done in a very elegant, user-friendly way.

I was focusing on wireless communication technologies as an undergrad. Before graduate school, I worked on interplanetary communication systems for satellites. In grad school, I studied cognitive radio. It was sort of wireless technology as well.

In the ’90s, in post-Soviet time, there were no toys in the Ukraine. So you built your own toys, you made your own fun. In high school, I was in robotics club, and we were building a lot of electronics systems. We didn’t have Digi-Key or anything like that. Definitely no Mouser. We had the electronics flea markets, where you could go and look at old PCB boards and try to scavenge old chips to use in your project.

We use a lot of help from Russia for our software development, so we actually work two or three shifts. We interact with Russian developers and software developers at night. Every time I come in the morning, the first thing I do is catch up with all the software team, see the progress that happened overnight. It gives everyone visibility of what’s happening in the company—even the people in Russia. I think that makes outsourcing so much better, when other people far away feel that they are part of the culture.

To have a narrow focus on exactly what needs to be done, what’s the best thing that could be done for the company. We get inquiries continuously. Narrowing the ones that are really important, the ones that need to be pursued, and being consistent on dropping the ones that are secondary are probably the hardest challenges. I don’t think I’ve got it figured out yet.

I don’t want to hide the fact that funding was an important part. Also it’s a validation that someone else believed in what you’re doing, and that’s quite important to the team. Being an entrepreneur, there are challenges on all fronts, and it’s smart to get as much help as you can. An incubator is a fantastic place to get a lot of meaningful feedback from people around you. It’s a community of like-minded people, and you are not developing in a vacuum of the great technology. Being in an incubator, helped us realize that it’s not about just technology. It’s abo

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 3 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Peter Platzer, the CEO of Spire, formerly NanoSatisfi.

I am a high energy and fusion physicist. I got really lucky in my youth. I got to spend some time at CERN and the Max Planck Institutes, and got to touch very, very large hardware. I was crawling through a fusion reactor at the Max Planck Institutes that I was writing my thesis on. It was an unparalleled inspirational experience.

And I always had this drive towards space, but it was, back then, too government-driven, so I followed my other passion, which was business, and joined the Boston Consulting Group. They then sent me to Harvard Business School, where I ended up starting a finance company—a quantitative training company. Then I ended up going back to International Space University in France and spent a year researching and studying anything about nanosatellites and the space industry, everything from the finance side, to the business side, to the legal side, which then culminated in a summer at NASA here in California, which then launched us into NanoSatisfi.

I mean, I’ve been tinkering with electronic circuitry and soldering since I was eight, nine, 10 years old; and I’ve been building those computers where I basically bought those components, figured them out, put them together so that I can compile faster. I basically always had the single fastest computer that you can build at any point in time.

More prominently early on, I had to drive almost every single process in the company. I was deeply involved in both the mechanical engineering parts, as well as the electrical engineering part, as well as the legal, business, and fundraising sides. Now my involvement is not as much in the day-to-day detail, but more in the higher level, steering and direction of the company. I’m more like a firefighter. For example, two days ago, they said, “Hey, Peter, we’re having a tough time getting a hold of vendor XYZ. You are our best enforcer, right? Can you give them a call?”

I think the hardest part of being a founder is dealing with people saying, “This is completely stupid. It will never work. It’s impossible.” If you’re a founder, it’s basically like disqualifying you as a person. And dealing with that, not taking it personally, and actually saying, “Okay, tell me why it is stupid.” I’ll ask the question seven times, “Why? Why? Why?” because nine out of 10 times, there is something that you can learn. It could be that you are presenting your idea the wrong way, that it is actually a wrong idea, or that you’re talking to the wrong people. Use it to your benefit, learn, and grow from it.

I mean, quite honestly, I think anyone who doesn’t choose accelerator is missing out. I think it’s 100% the correct way of building. For me, the people and the energy you surround yourself with are intricately linked to your success in whatever you do. You want to be part of an accelerator where there are a number of other companies that are in the same stage as you, that face the same problems as you, that you can exchange i

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 2 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Ilya Polyakov, co-founder and CTO of Revolve Robotics, a former portfolio company of Lemnos.

Being a long-time robotics guy, I really was against the idea of a non-roaming robot. I was convinced that this is a good idea when I was Skyping with my wife in New York. She was with my six-month-old baby, and we’re using a tablet. She’s fumbling with it, my daughter’s trying to eat the tablet, and that just doesn’t work. She needs to be able to get up, walk around with a baby, and I need to handle the aiming of the tablet. So originally, I made this thing for myself, but I figured if I need it, a lot of other people need it.

At the same time, as a company, we were working on a roaming telepresence robot. We saw a lot of crazy technical hurdles with that, like navigation and doors and Wi-Fi holes, and we were like, “What a minute, we can solve this problem with a stand.”

My history with robotics goes back to the mid-90s. I used to fight combat robots—first on “Robot Wars”, then “BattleBots”. Even back in high school, I started fighting robots and building robots. I did it all through college. Then I did industrial automation for a number of years, doing assembly robots and assembly cells for factories. That was my baptism by fire out of college. Then, I worked with my co-founder Marcus at our last startup for about seven years, developing electro active polymer, artificial muscle technology.

I have always been a maker. I got my soldering iron at age six. I grew up in communist Russia, before the collapse, where things were really shoddy. You held on to things and you patched them up. Cars would last 30 years because they just got to this permanent state of repair where you just kept it alive. That kind of maker culture, it was a survival thing.

One of the reasons I chose to do this is there is no such thing as a typical day. There are no set hours, because you’re always working. You’re always on email. I wake up in the morning, get on email, because the East Coast guy’s already sent you stuff, and you need to reply as soon as possible. One nice thing is we’re not working with China, so I don’t have to be up at three in the morning dealing with this.

Software. I’m a mechanical engineer by degree and I’m a designer kind of. I’m a hardware guy. Realistically, hardware nowadays is software wrapped in plastic. At Revolve, we have one person helping me on hardware and six contractors working on software. The software stuff has been really challenging, and navigating all the different ecosystems we have to operate within. We do web-ops, we do server ops, we do front-end web development, we do push notification, we work within iOS, and we do Bluetooth. There are just so many components outside of the actual hardware. By comparison, the hardware is the easy part.

Our old startup spun out of SRI. So getting funding spinning out of SRI was easy by comparison. We came in, we started talking to investors, and we’re like, “Oh crap, we kind of know what we’

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 1 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Chris Bruce, the CEO of Sproutling, which was acquired by Mattel.

I feel like I worked on a lot of products that are sugar water, to use the phrase from Steve Job’s biography. I wanted to work on something that I care about. I wanted to work on something that I could spend 10-15 years at, building a big company. It’s a very passionate project and it has to do with kids, which I have two of, and I love them dearly. That’s pretty much why I decided to focus on products that help families have better, easier tech.

Before my last startup, which was a social gaming company, I worked with Shawn Fanning at Rupture, which got acquired by Electronic Arts. That was a great experience just from complete chaos to an organized company. I think it’s a great, great time to do startups and create value from nothing.

I’ve always been one of these clichés. I have been coding since I was nine. Even early on, when I was in seventh and eighth grade, I started into electronics and built stuff that annoyed my parents—alarms that wouldn’t turn off from my room, CBs, robots and stuff. But software has always stuck with me. I felt like early on, when computers were young and not many people knew how to work them, it felt like I was inventing.

Unfortunately, it’s a little bit different than I think traditional entrepreneurs, because I have two kids. I’ve been in startups before I had kids and then after. For me, it’s really a time shift. I think what I have learned now is that I have to be much smarter about my time, much more effective with what I do.

My typical day is early, like maybe 5:00 a.m., and I get a little work done, and then I see my kids in the morning, then I head off to the lab. Other times, I do a lot of meetings, unfortunately. When you’re a CEO of a company, it’s endless meetings. The best days are the days that my nose is to the grindstone, and I can just sit in front of the computer coding all day.

One of the hardest things is, with software, I can work all night and have something. I don’t need to rely on any outside vendor. The hard things are dealing with shipping, like this particular chip because I need a board assembled and that chip happens to not be available, but it’s going to be available soon, so getting that. I feel like I’m waiting on components and other things. In a perfect world, I’d be able to just push a button and print out a PCB board and then have all the stuff on it.

I’ve started a couple companies, and I think I have a pretty good network and a good skill set for starting a company. But hardware is different. There’s so many things I didn’t understand about delivering a consumer electronics device. How do you get it on the shelf, how do you get the thing manufactured, what is a contract manufacturer, what are logistics? So I felt like we needed a hardware incubator to really help educate us on how to avoid those pitfalls and how to make connections with the investors. Lemnos has been invaluable. It’s also neat to work with other