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 2 Episode 8, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Sankarshan Murthy, CEO and co-founder; Prahlad Athreya, co-founder; and Garrett Rayner, co-founder at Bumblebee Spaces, which is revolutionizing living spaces using robotics and AI. Bumblebee Spaces is a Lemnos portfolio company.

Sankarshan: We didn’t start off thinking it would be a hardware company. I was trying to solve a problem of how we use space in our home. The user-experience around the house is very fragmented. How you rent, how you furnish, how you store things, how you retrieve things, how you lose things. The whole UX is broken. The way we compensate for it is paying a lot for housing to stay where we need to live. If we’re getting priced out of neighborhoods, we are now having a poor quality of life by having long commutes, being stuck in traffic, and spending less time with family. Where we live and how we live—there’s a disconnect. We want to fix that by creating space essentially. So we’re making space using robotics and AI.

Sankarshan: My background’s in hardware. Prahlad’s from software. Garrett’s from hardware. Garrett and I are hardware tinkerers. Garrett has a workshop in his garage. I’m more hacky. I worked on iPhone and Apple Watch, so we’ve seen a ridiculous amount of scaling. We’ve also seen things that come together with the precision of hardware that make a delightful user experience. There’s something very satisfying about working with hardware. Things are real. It’s tangible. It’s coming alive.

Garrett: The fascinating thing about space, whether it’s residential, commercial, or retail, it’s not used all that efficiently. If you think about a hardware product design, you’re doing a lot of packaging work, trying to make the best use of volumetric space. Housing doesn’t really do that at all. There was a pretty clear direction for us to move in once we started thinking about the spaces people live in.

Sankarshan: We are still evolving. We started with one specific module, with one specific way to insert it into the market as one channel. Then we realized that will only have so much impact, and our vision grew. We simplified and descoped a lot of our hardware, while we expanded the offering. Our hardware became simpler, but our vision and our ambition became greater when we went through this process of learning what really the market needs.

Sankarshan: We have some really good advisors now. They come from leading different parts of the industry. They are entrepreneurial thinkers. They give advice without any personal stake in it. They give it just like they would approach solving the problem. This long conversation of unwrapping with them has been super helpful for us…. I also seek out people who are not big believers of the idea or they have some suspicion about why it might not penetrate. There’s some real value in extracting what is causing this adoption friction with them…because it’s all about seeing blind spots that we’re not seeing.

Garrett: Being in the Lemnos sphere and having