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

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 7 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Dave Merrill, co-founder of Sifteo and Elroy Air, and Venture Partner at Lemnos.

Sifteo started at the MIT Media Lab. Jeevan and I reconnected there as graduate students. We recognized that we both shared this interest in how to make our interactions with information more effective and to evolve them past the current state-of-the-art interfaces. The idea for Sifteo cubes as a game system basically happened when we were deciding to start the company. The moment that we realized we were really on to something was when the talk that I gave at TED went on the Internet and just went wild. It was kind of a viral success before there was such a thing as Kickstarter. I would look at that talk going online as our equivalent Kickstarter moment, except that I wish I had a pre-order button next to it. I did not.

I’m a tool guy. I grew up watching my dad use woodcutting power tools like table saws and circular saws. When I was little, I played with a lot of what I now understand to be constructivist toys like Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and things where you were building complicated structures out of a lot of simple pieces. Before I went to college, I did a bunch of my own projects in the garage, kind of taking after my dad. For physics class, I built a model roller coaster that was awesome with a lot of hot glue and WeedWacker line.

I remember when we were designing cubes for the first time as a company I would spend some part of my day working on circuits, debugging and doing PCB layout, and some part of the day interacting with our industrial design firm. When you’re in the phase where you’re manufacturing, you get used to a mid-afternoon start to the communication with China, if you’re doing China-based manufacturing. By 3:00 p.m. or 4:00 p.m. we’d start to get some emails from our guys over there, and start to be available for whatever problem solving is going to be needed that day. Now, I may go to a meet-up and talk about Sifteo or speak on a panel or things like that just to keep the company out there in the public imagination. It’s hard to say what a typical day looks like because there are no typical days, really.

For me, it’s that transition that a lot of engineers in management go through. When you started, you loved to tinker and you spent all day building. As a founder, there’s so many things that require your attention, you probably are not going to get to spend much time, if any, actually getting your hands dirty with code or circuits. It’s navigating that transition of like, “Okay, so, how do I reallocate my time?” Then also, “How do I kind of reallocate my sense of satisfaction in what I’m doing every day?” If you’re a person that really loves making and building, as soon as you are a manager, it’s great because if you’re fortunate, like Jeevan and I have been, to be working alongside a super talented team of engineers and designers and customer support people, then all the sudden the capabilities of what