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 3 Episode 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Colin Beighley, co-founder and Director of Hardware Engineering, and Fergus Noble, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Swift Navigation, a Lemnos portfolio company. Swift provides centimeter-accurate RTK GNSS positioning for autonomous vehicles, robotics, precision agriculture, UAVs, and surveying. Swift products deliver 100X better accuracy than cell phone GPS.

Colin: Our story goes back to 2012, in Santa Cruz where Colin and I met working on this flying winter bind. The idea was to take a huge kite with a rigid wing tethered to the ground. It had propellers like a drone. It would fly up and when it would catch the wind, the propellers would become turbines, generate power, and send it back down.

Fergus: Colin and I were tasked with how to fly this thing, control it, and find out where it was. Through that, we started learning about precision GPS technology primarily for drones, and our old boss, Joban, at Joby Energy, gave us a little bit of angel funding to explore the idea of taking this technology to market.

Fergus: I’ve kind if been a long time hardware tinkerer. I was a physics major, but I’d always built electronics, software, tinkered with firmware, embedded systems in my spare time, but this was really the first time doing anything like this in a professional context. It was definitely a bit of a leap to go from bedroom tinkering to starting a company actually building hardware product.

Colin: I did do a little bit of GPS stuff in college, but for me, it really wasn’t before college.

Fergus: The first Swift product was a derivative of some technology we had been working on. We built our first prototypes, did a lot of testing, and then we actually launched that first product with a Kickstarter campaign, and that really took off in a way that we hadn’t anticipated.

Colin: It was a natural extension of what we were already working on. We thought, “Okay, we built this thing for this one application. We have a bunch of interest from other companies. Let’s see if we can kind of broaden the applications that it can support.”

Colin: I think we’re sitting here with one of the mentors that we found extremely useful.

Fergus Noble: Tim, our CEO and third co-founder, took a very thoughtful approach to it. He looked at the areas where we needed to level up our expertise and actively sought out on LinkedIn or through other people in our community the best experts in those areas. He then would find someway of getting a connection to them. It gets easier over time, as your network grows, and if you have investors, they’re a fantastic resource for this because they’re spending a lot of time networking with all the best resources in the area.

Fergus: When we came into Lemnos, we had a pretty good idea of t