The Hardware Entrepreneur

My interviewee is Peter Havas, co-founder and CEO of PillDrill, USA.

PillDrill wants to ease the way people take their medicine. Their first product is already very much beloved by the customers.

Peter has a long track-record of entrepreneurship. He started his first company at the age of 24, which failed unfortunately. He certainly learned from this experience as his second company, SandwichDirect.com, which was founded in 1999 was a success which resulted in the acquirer eventually becoming a 100 million USD company with Peter being its CTO.

In this interview Peter talks about his motivation why he started PillDrill, his take on whether you should be a subject-matter expert in a discipline to start a company, or if it’s better to have other traits. You’ll also learn why it’s better to sell directly to consumers first. In addition you’ll hear also about his connection to Brinc, an accelerator that was featured in episode 11 of this podcast. Peter will tell you also about the essential elements of his innovation and many more.

Enjoy!

Learn more about this episode via the highlights as seen below.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

• FitBit for taking medication and the problem it addresses – [2:30]
• What fueled Peter’s motivation to start the company? - [4:42]
• When there are enough stars aligning - [6:06]
• Earlier endeavors before PillDrill and what Peter learned from them - [7:14]
• The advantage of not having subject matter expertise in an area when you start out a business, according to Peter - [9:55]
• Why did the company chose to sell first direct to the consumer?- [11:36]
• “How a product makes you feel determines the relationship you have with it” - [12:50]
• Main investors in the company and the stages of funding - [15:07]
• The business model of the company - [18:30]
• PillDrill’s three core design principles - [20:50]
• Features of the app that help users keep being active and mobile - [24:38]
• Locations of prototyping and manufacturing of the product - [28:08]
• “Let’s only drop the balls that can bounce” – lessons Peter learned while developing the company- [31:00]
• If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [33:20]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [34:16]
• Peter’s opinion on habits – [35:28]
• Some memorable cultural differences that Peter had to overcome throughout his career – [36:30]
• What is the best way to reach Peter? – [38:02]

I’ve recently interviewed Finbarr Watterson, Hardware Community Evangelist at Fictiv, from the Bay Area, USA. His company is all into helping you iterate on your early product versions faster and with high quality.

Fin has been entrenched in the manufacturing industry for over 5 years living in both Shenzhen, China and the San Francisco Bay Area. He works closely with the hardware community to create content and events that help engineers and designers to build better hardware.

Fictiv is a pretty interesting company - I wish they were also outside the Bay Area. They provide very short lead-times for orders for parts that are 3D printed or CNC-machined.

We discussed many topics in this interview, their vision, mission, some examples of hardware startups, such as Lockitron’s mistake in the early phase they learned from, their experience with validating their product with customers and how they scaled production from manufacturing a few units to mass-manufacturing in China. We discussed Fictiv’s business model, their services related to rapid prototyping that makes them different from their competitors, how they bootstrapped their company using an MVP or Minimum Viable Product. This interview reminds me of some of the topics discussed in episode 7 with Radu Diaconescu of Swie.io which works with a similar business model and episode 23 with Jacob Rothman of Platform88 when we talked about manufacturing consumer products in China.

Enjoy this episode. The highlights can be seen below.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• The vision and mission of Fictiv - [3:10]
• Finbarr’s role as hardware evangelist and Fictiv’s core business - [3:34]
• What’s the value proposition of the company? – [6:35]
• The frustration that drives innovation – the story of the company’s MVP [8:35]
• Their business model and what it has to do with Airbnb - [11:37]
• Considerations on Design for Manufacturing - [16:44]
• Who are their competitors and how are they different? - [17:53]
• Stages of financing the company - [20:25]
• Mistakes that Finbarr made after he joined the company, which he learned from - [21:08]
• Manufacturing in the U.S. vs China: Minimum Order Quantity, inventory, iterations - [23:44]
• Going from small-scale production in the US to mass-manufacturing in China - [27:02]
• Examples of companies which went from prototyping in the US to mass manufacturing in China - [29:34]
• If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [30:33]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [31:25]
• An Iron Man habit – [31:49]
• What kind of cultural differences Finbarr had to overcome during his career? – [33:08]
• What is the best way to reach Finbarr? – [35:05]

I’ve had recently the chance to interview Alok Tayi, co-founder and CEO of TetraScience, a startup that was formed by MIT-Harvard graduates, based in Boston. This interview allowed me to connect with my past as scientist and therefore their work greatly resonated with me.

Their vision is to connect every scientific experiment and instrument to a single online dashboard. This means their work is related to IoT. But that’s not all. In order to have an even bigger impact, they do innovation related to the scientists’ workflow so scientists and researchers can have a higher added value.

Alok himself is scientist and entrepreneur; he has strong background in both. What we talked about is his (entrepreneurial) career before TetraScience, the situation when founding the company, including the Eureka moment He elaborated on the main part of the business model, why it’s attractive for labs of all sizes, how they validated their idea, how they came up with the price point. He talked also about product development, mistakes they made and their participation in Y Combinator’s accelerator program.

Enjoy this epic performance by Alok, giving a lot of details on their strategy, specifics about how they built their business.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• Earlier entrepreneurial initiatives before TetraScience and their connections with the present venture - [2:55]
• The mission of TetraScience - [5:55]
• The business model behind TetraScience - [7:10]
• Alok's Eureka moment and how he started the company – [9:30]
• The process of validating the idea - [12:36]
• How did the team decide on the price of the product? - [14:36]
• Strengths and previous experience that helped Alok - [18:35]
• What are the advantages of TetraScience in the context of IoT? - [22:53]
• Key hardware-related learning points during the development - [25:55]
• Mistakes that the team made while growing the company - [29:40]
• How did the startup benefit from participating in the Y Combinator accelerator? - [32:10]
• If he could time travel and go back in time, what notes would he give himself? – [34:40]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [35:16]
• Alok’s work-related habits – [35:58]
• Some observations in regard to cultural differences that Alok has made throughout his career – [37:58]
• What is the best way to reach Alok? – [39:40]

My guest is Shaun Arora, co-founder and Managing Director of Southern California’s only hardware accelerator, Make in LA.

Besides being the Managing Director, he’s an angel investor in 35 startups, and sits on the board of the contracting manufacturing company he helped build for over a decade of exponential growth (NEO Tech). He has a diverse background, which I see as one of his strengths, since before NEO Tech, he worked as a cultural anthropologist for alcohol brands and CPG companies.

In this podcast I’ve had so far 2 accelerators on the show, Brinc from Hong Kong and an accelerator with several hardware verticals from Switzerland, Kickstart Accelerator. I’m glad to feature Make in LA now from sunny California. In this episode we discuss topics such as his journey before and during Make in LA, what their program is about, including what they offer. Shaun talks about LA, why it’s a hot place due to its hardware ecosystem. He talks about examples of startups that successfully graduated from their program, and apart from successes, he is also open to talk about mistakes he made which he could learn from.

Learn more about this episode via the highlights as seen below.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

• What is Make in LA all about? – [2:43]
• Offers and strengths of Make in LA – [4:42]
• Types of hardware topics that are addressed in the accelerator – [7:56]
• Finance offerings to startups and the accelerator’s business model - [9:02]
• Successful startups as examples that graduated from the accelerator – [10:40]
• How does Make in LA implement its follow-on funding? - [12:30]
• What is a B corp and how does it add a social element in the work of Make in LA? - [14:48]
• How does Shaun “prevent people from falling off the cliff?” - [17:43]
• How and until when companies can apply for the only accelerator in Southern California? - [19:03]
• Mistakes Shaun made along the journey and what he could learn - [21:15]
• If you could time travel to the time when you were younger, what notes would you give yourself? – [23:33]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [26:04]
• “If you measure, you’re going to improve” – [27:50]
• Some striking cultural differences that Shaun had to overcome in his work– [29:58]
• What is the best way to reach Shaun? – [31:31]

I’ve had as guest Mattias Lepp, co-founder and CEO of Click and grow, a company from Estonia. His company is a green one that wants to create an even greener future: their vision is to change the way plants are grown around the world.

Mattias has a quite unique background, i.e. a long-term experience in plant cultivation, IT and design and educated as a choirmaster.

Today, besides being the CEO he’s also responsible for R&D and strategic management. We discussed many topics, such as their participation in two famous accelerator programs, Y Combinator and Hardware Club, but also when actually the seeds for the company started to grow, the companies they get help from, e.g. NASA, Google, Apple. He explained their technological innovations, how they financed their developments to come to the results and he elaborated on their business model, as well. I asked him also what mistakes they made along the way and he discussed each of the main ones.

Enjoy this episode. The highlights can be seen below.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

• When sustainability has a prominent place in Harrods – [2:30]
• Earlier [ad]ventures before Click and Grow – [3:43]
• What is it about Estonia that stimulated Mattias' business idea? – [6:20]
• How did NASA fuel further Mattias' passion for gardening? - [7:30]
• The two essential components of Click and Grow that make it unique - [8:40]
• How did the company receive its initial investment? - [10:20]
• Adaptive lighting for growing plants – [12:30]
• What is the common thing between Nespresso, Keurig and Click and Grow? - [14:07]
• The importance of Hardware club accelerator in the development of Mattias’ company - [16:13]
• Why is the company based both in Estonia and USA? - [17:46]
• The toughest challenges they ran into during development – [19:30]
• Mistakes during the development of Click and Grow – [21:18]
• If you could go back in time to the time when you were in your 20s, what notes would you give yourself? – [24:22]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [24:56]
• Some interesting habits that Mattias has – [25:28]
• Some cultural differences that Mattias had to overcome in his work – [26:40]
• What is the best way to reach Mattias? – [28:42]

My guest was Jacob Rothman, co-founder of Platform88, which offers services from China.

Jacob has over fifteen years of experience working in China. He has founded several companies including Smart Products, Velong Enterprises, and his latest venture, Platform88. With Platform88 his goal is to help hardware entrepreneurs with their manufacturing, retail needs.

This is a first episode where a company which is based in China is featured. Since the world’s manufacturing base, especially for hardware, consumer products is in China, I find his topic extremely relevant for this podcast. We’ll discuss such topics as how much retail and manufacturing has changed in the world and in particular in China in recent years; how Jacob arrived to China and how he got to start his recent company. You’ll learn what differentiates them from accelerators, what products they specialize in, what kind of innovations they like very much. We also discussed what market trends he can see that can be significant opportunities for startups. We brought up also an example of a hardware startup called Stojo which they worked with.

Learn more about this episode via the highlights as seen below.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

• A different China – [3:03]
• What’s going on in the world’s manufacturing base? – [4:20]
• Jacob’s journey to Platform88 - [5:35]
• Changes in the retail sector that created opportunities for factories - [7:25]
• What do your factories do? - [9:14]
• What services does Platform88 offer? - [10:23]
• The key differentiators of Platform88 - [12:22]
• At what stage of development startups should reach out to Platform88? - [15:05]
• “If you're going to scale, eventually you're going to get to China” – [17:35]
• The benefit of working with somebody who is in your vertical - [18:52]
• Why does Jacob prefer to focus on more traditional products rather than technological marvels? – [21:00]
• What are some development and market trends that would allow new entrepreneurs to thrive, according to Jacob - [24:30]
• How does Platform88 deal with the cash flow issue of startups? - [26:41]
• If you could go back in time to the time when you were younger, what would you tell yourself? – [28:00]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [28:45]
• Jacob’s work related habits – [30:40]
• Some cultural differences that Jacob had to overcome in his work – [31:51]
• What is the best way to reach Jacob? – [33:48]

I’ve interviewed Joshua Spodek, a professor at NYU and an entrepreneur. This has been an eye-opener interview for me on leadership, how to master it and also on his teaching methods, his entrepreneurial journey.

Joshua is a best-selling author of the book called “Leadership Step by Step”, which has recently come out. In this interview we talked about his leadership principles which he describes also in his book. He’s a professor and a coach, teaching about leadership and entrepreneurship. In addition he writes regularly for Inc magazine, holds five Ivy-League degrees, including a PhD in Astrophysics and an MBA, both from Columbia University. Following his academic career he co-founded a company called Submedia, commercializing his hardware invention for in-tunnel motion-pictures. We talked also about this and what problems they ran into. Beyond his professional achievements, he completed six marathons, swam across the Hudson River, did over 90,000 burpees, wrote over 2500 blog posts, took over 250 cold showers. This means you’ll also get to hear about some of his habits.

Enjoy this episode, which I did very much.

One more thing: if you want to have access to a material that Joshua made available for you as my podcast listener click here.  

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Show highlights can be seen below:

• How does Joshua warp time? - [3:03]
• What's the common thing between Joshua, Balint and Nobel Prize winners - [4:32]
• The motivation of a physics researcher to become an entrepreneur - [6:55]
• What if it were straight instead of round – the story of a zoetrope - [8:45]
• The timeline of starting their company - [10:35]
• What he would have done differently when prototyping - [13:55]
• "Don't forget to do some experiment" - [16:55]
• How did Joshua move from the business world of entrepreneurship into teaching leadership and teaching entrepreneurship - [18:00]
• The other side of business [life] - [22:25]
• How is project-based learning the future of education? - [ 25:10]
• What it is about actors, musicians and sports people that inspired Joshua to write a book on leadership? - [26:55]
• What is method learning? - [29:55]
• An example of a project-based learning by a 10th grader - [33:30]
• Some of the reactions to Joshua's way of teaching - [37:20]
• How does Joshua think we can incorporate innovative teaching methods in the current educational system? - [40:10]
• If you could time travel and go back in time to your early 20s, what would you do differently or what information would you give yourself? - [44:30]
• Books which had the biggest impact on Joshua's career and entrepreneurial thinking - [45:25]
• The habit of not messing around with your habits - SIDCHA - [46:17]
• You believing it's hard is one of the main things that's making it hard - [49:40]
• Some striking cultural differences in Joshua's work that he had to overcome - [51:30]
• "What do we have that's all over the place that I'm not noticing?" - [53:40]
• What is the best way to reach Joshua? - [55:46]

I had a duo-feature interview with Kickstart Accelerator from Switzerland, Patricia Schlenter, responsible for Program Lead and David Emmert, head of one of the verticals of the program.

In a previous episode, we had Brinc on the show, an IoT accelerator. This time we feature another accelerator, which has a wider range of disciplines they’re handling, but still, also hardware topic comes up in their portfolio of companies.

Now a little bit about my guests. As for Patricia, she received her Bachelor’s from Bocconi University, Milan, Italy and her Master’s in Energy, Trade of Finance from Cass Business School, London, UK. She subsequently worked in the shipping industry in London, then started her own fashion accessory company. Shortly afterwards she became a co-founder for a Venture Capitalist’s startup in Berlin, Germany.

David on the other hand has a background in biology and economics and likes to create and work with people with lots of energy. When he is not busy with Kickstart, he's working on his own startup "Imagine Cargo" in the area of sustainable logistics.

In this episode we’ll discuss what they do, all the verticals they have, what their differentiating factors are from other accelerators, the corporate partners they partner with, the steps a startup would go through when working them. They explain their business model, what disruption means for David and many more.

Please have a look at the detailed highlights below and enjoy listening. Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

• An overview of one of Europe’s largest multi-corporate accelerators – [3:24]
• What does a Vertical Lead and a Program Lead do in Kickstart Accelerator? – [5:03]
• How David defines disruption – [6:00]
• The selection process of Kickstart Accelerator – [7:20]
• David walks us through their programusing an example from food vertical – [8:40]
• The unique features of Kickstart Accelerator – [10:08]
• The accelerator’s business model and why David thinks it’s sustainable in the long run– [11:08]
• Switzerland’s drive to catch up with startup innovation – [12:30]
• What are the sources of inspiration of Patricia and David? - [13:48]
• If you could time travel and go back in time to your early 20s, what information would you give yourself? – [15:40]
• Books which had the biggest impact on their career and entrepreneurial thinking – [16:25]
• Morning routines and creative chaos – [17:00]
• Some striking cultural differences in their work that they had to overcome– [18:00]
• What is the best way to reach Patricia and David? – [19:28]

I had as guest Benjamin Ertl, Director of Business Development at Retailbound. He works in retail, helping entrepreneurs on how to get their product to customers in a lean and agile way.

He gives you an intro to retail field, and to his company. Due to their uniqueness in essence they enable companies to operate lean and agile especially during the risky phase when a business model has not been validated yet, so taking on more staff would be a risky move. Since when working with them one doesn’t have to take on more personnel, this means one can operate leaner, and agile as they’re flexible based on the needs.

Benjamin finds himself lucky that he was mentored and educated for the last two and a half years on the complexities of retail personally by his company’s President - Yohan Jacob.  Swimming competitively in college for four years and having an older brother has made him very competitive - which translates well for retail.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Please have a look at the highlights below and enjoy listening.

• How retail works for hardware products – [2:43]
• What’s the main value-add of Retailbound? – [4:07]
• A retail team to help you become retail ready – [5:12]
• How did Benjamin end up in [retail]bound? - [8:27]
• Their services offered and their business model - [10:58]
• What is retail coaching? - [14:10]
• The future of retail from startups’ perspective - [14:46]
• If you should limit distribution - [16:30]
• If you could go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [18:57]
• Which book had the biggest impact on Benjamin’s career? – [19:50]
• Segmenting, planning and doing sports – [21:06]
• When in Rome do as the Romans do – [22:40]
• What is the best way to reach Benjamin? – [24:30]

My guest is Keith Gunura, co-founder and CEO of noonee, producers of an exoskeleton-like device.

Keith developed the Chairless Chair® at the ETH Zurich in 2009 to help now production line workers.

We’ll discuss with Keith what Forrest Gump has to do with noonee’s technology, how the company was started, Keith’s way of simplifying things to attack a real problem. Keith will talk about how they got into CNN and how it happened that some people didn’t like this much. We’ll cover the future of exoskeletons, why they are working with an engineering company, a similar company to the one that was featured in episode 16 of this podcast.

Learn more about this episode via the highlights as seen below.

Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com

Enjoy listening.

Show highlights can be seen below:

• What problem does chairless chair solve and for whom? – [2:20]
• The story behind founding noonee - [4:29]
• Iron Man as main topic others focus on vs simplifying the problem? - [5:40]
• How to be featured on CNN – [7:31]
• What good could happen when journalists don’t keep their promises? – [ 10:35]
• BMW and Audi, the first supporters of the chairless chair, and their views on the publicity of the idea – [13:05]
• What is an exoskeleton? – [15:03]
• How do you know you’re on the right wagon? – [16:19]
• From a university spin-out to working closely with an engineering company or why you can’t do everything yourself?– [18:36]
• Chairless chair current stage of development – [20:43]
• What’s the near-term future for exoskeletons? – [22:22]
• If you could time travel and go back in time to your early 20s, what notes would you give yourself? – [23:28]
• Which book had the biggest impact on Keith’s career? – [24:02]
• Co-founders’ habits  – [24:52]
• The way they do business – [26:08]
• What is the best way to reach Keith? – [28:32]