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 2, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Idan Beck, CEO and co-founder of Dream OS, a Lemnos portfolio company. With Dream, VR meetings and collaborations are more human, dynamic, and responsive than anything previously possible.

Entertainment applications in VR are clearly amazing, but wouldn’t it be great if you could just look at a [physical object] and then interact with it or if there was some kind of way to do that?

I’ve been obsessed with graphics since I was 12 or 13. I wrote my first 3D engines when I was in high school. I wanted to do the startup thing… When I started my company, my first company Incident with the gTar and later Keys. I left Microsoft, I was working out of my parents’ garage in Cupertino and just building this thing. Legitimately just sending parts to Quick parts, getting boards fabbed, soldering. This was a very complicated product, even though it looked like a guitar it was a mixed signal DSP system. We had four or five microprocessors running simultaneously. It was a really complicated piece of hardware.

The product that we released in October, manifested in the middle of this year. This product comes from my experience of flying to China every other week. In the beginning, we were talking a lot about making something that really leans on the strengths of Spatial. We liked immersive technology like AR and VR, and we believe as a company, the strength of those is in connecting people, allowing people to do things together across large distances but it feels like you’re right next to each other. I think everybody today is starting to really appreciate the importance of remote working, distributed working, and I think that’s only going to continue and become a more of a standard, as the technology stacks available to companies continue to evolve and improve.

I would consider Charles Hudson not just an investor, mentor and advisor, but also a deep friend. When I came back from China and I was ready to do Dream, I came to him. I barely had a team at the time. Since then, he’s been nothing but supportive.  I’d say Charles Huang as well. He was my first investor with gTar, and when I was trying to figure out how to do Dream, I was working out of his office.

It was Jeremy who brought me in. Jeremy has now left Lemnos to start Quartz, which is really cool. I’d known Jeremy a long time, and we had a lot of mutual respect, having worked in the IoT hardware space for a while.

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Early on I was doing hardware with Dream. I built a complete schematic. I thought we’re going to have to build the entire stack. I’m not convinced that we’re not going to have to do that one day. But at the time I had built a full schematic. I even got bare metal graphics working on the chipset.