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

Into the Forge Podcast #1: Chris Bruce of Sproutling

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, wha