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 9, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO, and Dirk Sigurdson, co-founder and CTO of Privacy Labs, a Lemnos portfolio company. Privacy Labs is helping people be free, private, and secure online.

Giri: The idea for Privacy Labs was motivated by what we were learning about government mass surveillance and the extent to which large companies were making this possible. It was really about working through some different concepts and realizing that this was the one that we felt the most passionate about.

Dirk: I’d say that the Edward Snowden revelations were pretty critical and instrumental to us starting this company. I, personally, had been pretty hesitant about sharing personal information with corporations for a long period of time, but once we came to the realization that it wasn’t just corporate surveillance, it’s also government surveillance that is becoming a big concern, that really gave us a good push to get into this space.

Giri: I studied computer science, but I’m not a hardware guy. I didn’t really do a whole lot of hands-on hardware work, but I grew up in a household where there was a lot of that. My dad was a tinkerer. I learned how to work on a car at an early age. Then I was fortunate early in my career to work on a lot of hardware-based projects. I spent time in the Aerospace and Defense industry at Lockheed Martin and got to work on wireless sensor networks and the airborne laser program. A lot of the projects were about software that runs at a very low level, basically directly on the hardware.

Dirk: Growing up as a kid, I was always building stuff, always into taking apart pretty much any device. I got a mechanical engineering degree, but I was introduced into programming through a requirement for my mechanical engineering degree. I was like, “Wow, I can get something created just by sitting in front of a computer and I’m still building something.” Maybe it’s not as tangible, but you feel the same satisfaction of building something virtually.

Giri: We started to think, given what we understand about the threats that are out there and given what we understand about different ways to approach the problem and what our needs are, what does a product even begin to look like? We started prototyping along that path and then we decided to take it to a broader audience to get feedback.

Dirk: Before we talked to a lot of people, we tried to create a very rudimentary, as-fast-as-possible solution. And the reaction that we got from people made us take the next step, knowing that we’re working on something that could have a huge mass appeal.

Giri: One of the interesting things about starting a company is that there is no shortage of advice. It’s a balance of finding people that you respect and managing your own ego, being able to say, “Okay, even though this is what I believe and the direction that I want to go in, can I pull that back and really take critical or analytical feedback because I really do respe