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 4, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Jeremy Conrad and Conor Lenahan, co-founders of Quartz, a Lemnos portfolio company. Quartz identifies, tracks, and predicts everything that moves on a construction site, making construction measurably safer.

Conor: I spent some time working on some really large organizations. I spent some time working at small organizations, and I started to have that itch. I knew I wanted to get something started.

Jeremy: I’ve always been building stuff my entire life. My first job out of college is building weapons grade lasers in the Air Force. That is when I really discovered I wanted to start a company. And after spending eight years as a venture capitalist, that part of me just got the itch to get back in the driver’s seat. What it comes down to is the ability as a founder to have an incredible impact and have decision-making capabilities.

Conor: I’ve always been drawn towards making things, it’s something I’ve always loved. I was a construction worker in the summers [during high school], and I really loved learning this is how you work with wood, this is how you build a house, this is how you set up drainage and a yard. And that went to a mechanical engineering degree.

Jeremy: I certainly always had an interest, but I came into my own when I got to MIT. MIT has such an incredible set of programs to support undergrads to do projects. My first two years I worked on a satellite program. I worked on drones, I worked on a self-driving car for the Darpa Grand Challenge with Kyle who ended up founding Cruise, so my entire undergrad was really small teams building advanced hardware. Then going into the Air Force, where it’s very big hardware.

Jeremy: When we started, we agreed we don’t want to be an R&D company, where we spend years in development. So we asked, “What is the simplest, easiest thing that we could get into market that helps build towards our long-term vision?”

Conor: The way we got to this idea is that we went through 1500 really bad ideas first. We had the benefit of being able to set a couple months aside for doing fairly broad research into what direction we wanted to go. As we were doing all this research, construction kept jumping out. Construction is something that’s super important and people interact with everyday in their life. It’s one of the most inefficient and wasteful industries on earth, and there are incredible strides to be made in the industry. We found a path that involved six months of development work to getting something that went into the world, got us real answers, and had us interacting with customers.

Jeremy: There are two core groups and one are the investors. Lemnos was our first investor, and being able to work with the entire Lemnos team has been a key part of this company’s development. The other set of people is founder peers. I forced Conor early on. I said, “You need to meet more people who are at our level or one to two years in front of us.” Because whenever something goes wrong, like