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 6 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with interviewing John Stanfield, the co-founder and CEO of Local Motion, which was acquired by Zipcar.

Clement and I co-founded Local Motion in 2010, just out of Stanford. I came out of a product design program there in the mechanical engineering group and Clement was MS&E (Management, Science, and Engineering). We had an idea to try and solve local mobility by building a four-wheeled plug-in electric vehicle that was designed from the ground up to share—something that was designed to be sold to places and not people and really focus on the local sharing of mobility. What we found after about two years was that our real true value in the marketplace was to offer that sharing ability to existing infrastructures. We separated the vehicle from a small piece of hardware and software platform that we now sell to large fleets across the United States and Europe.

I have a bit of a unique history. I studied Physics in undergrad and didn’t want to build bombs for the Navy. I continued doing my college job, which was wild firefighting. I did that for 12 years, rappelled down helicopters, sawed down trees on fire, and had a great time. But then, I came to Silicon Valley after starting a high-rise window cleaning service-based business in San Francisco, growing that to about 12 times its annual revenue, and selling it back to the original founder. I came down to Silicon Valley and got into Stanford for my graduate work and that’s where I met Clement.

I’ve always been an innovator, a creator, and a builder. I’ve always created things from furniture to two-wheeled electric vehicles in my garage. I started a vegetable oil conversion business in Los Angeles to take any diesel motor and allow it to run on waste vegetable oil. I invented some technology, started a company, and started realizing very quickly that the waste vegetable market is basically a commodities market and it’s very difficult to penetrate.

For me, right now, it’s all about just finding efficiencies and shifting between my multiple hats. Generally, in the morning, I come in and try to make sure there are no major problems with our existing platform. That’s checking in with the engineering teams that are working on customer satisfaction to backend software. I’m also basically the hiring manager, and I handle the finances, so I make sure that everything’s in order on the finance side. But the biggest part of my job right now is actually product development on our physical product, the user interface at the cars.

Hiring salespeople is the hardest thing that I have done to date. I would much rather solve a complex mechanism or a technical problem. I really had to learn how to hire sales and marketing people because I’ve never done it before. I had to create a way that I could look at sales roles and sales hiring from a technical perspective. We had to come up with a real, concrete solution-based set of questions