This is an episode on a topic that, I believe, should get more attention in entrepreneurship circles. My guest is Stephen Key of inventRight.
Stephen is literally one of the teachers of Tim Ferriss. He went to Stephen’s lectures and sought his advice on how he can make his business at that time, BrainQUICKEN more efficient.
Do you really need to found a company? This is the question we address in this episode. Stephen is a lifelong entrepreneur, inventor and a renowned intellectual property strategist.
This episode is split into 2 parts, because this way the topic can get more attention. In part 1 you will learn how Stephen helped Tim Ferriss and what he got in return unexpectedly. Stephen also discusses what the most important thing is today when you want to bring out a product to market. You can find out some guidelines from him on when to start a startup and when to license. And when you want to sell something, shall you sell the product first or something else?
Enjoy this episode.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
My guest is Alan Clayton of SOSV, who’s the Roaming Mentor at the VC and who’s been with the company since the beginnings.
You might know as SOSV as it’s the world’s top hardware VC. They’re special also in another aspect as unlike other VCs, SOSV runs accelerator programs, such as HAX, HAX Growth, RebelBio, IndieBio, Food-X, Chinaaccelerator, MOX. They are understandably very tech-focused and Alan Clayton is the person who understands people. This means he makes sure you have the right team to deliver the right results as otherwise things can and if they can, then they will go wrong.
The question we addressed in this episode is: how can you maximize your success with your team? You can learn in this episode about successful team’s composition, the Herrmann Brain
Dominance Instrument (HBDI) for testing what areas the team covers, and also how this knowledge can help you pitch your idea better. So in essence we’ll go deeper than just talking about the left and right brain thinking.
Enjoy this episode!
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
I had a special guest on the podcast, somebody who’s also originally from Hungary, just like me. My guest was Alexandra Mandoki, founder, chief guide and innovator at Sparks Guide based in Zurich, Switzerland, just like me.
Would you like to perhaps double your brain activity? Then this episode is for you. You’ll soon also learn how the same technique with Lego can be used in a group setting to innovate, to let some creativity juice flow. This topic is close to me as I used to love and still love Lego.
This interview was recorded with a camera, for the change, and this is its audio version. You will learn from Alexandra about the method she’s an expert of and also about its myriad applications that are just mind-boggling. I don’t know why exactly this method is not so widespread yet, but I hope that after this episode some of you find it useful, even if you “just” use its basics.
Enjoy this episode.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
Dimitri Nabatov has been my guest recently, founder and CEO of a company called WeAreCinema.
In episode 36 we had VR topic and this time again we’re back to that topic on the show. His company, WeAreCinema has a new business model in the world of VR and his company is a nice example that in order to become successful with hardware products there are a number of ways of doing that, including theirs.
You can learn about VR, why it’s special in the entertainment or advertisement industries, how they validated their idea with very cheap hardware, and also how they managed to pre-sell their idea to customers, getting strong market validation without investing almost nothing. You can also learn how he started thinking about the scaling topic in his business at an early phase and this serves as the basis of his current business model. He also gives a challenge to you, innovators, a call for innovation.
Enjoy.
Show highlights can be seen below:
My guest is Jong-Wook Shin from the US, founder and CEO of HOPii, which is a company for beer-lovers.
For you who wants to know how to get to the source where it’s the beer is freshest. You’ll also learn why beer on the shelves is actually far from being fresh.
Jong is not simply an avid beer drinker. He was formerly Vice President of Innovations, with over 21 years of experience in high tech innovations. You’ll hear in this interview quite well, I believe how excited Jong is to bring the HOPii’s vision to life and introduce brand new craft beer experiences to fellow craft beer lovers. He talks also about their business model’s attractiveness, so not only the hardware itself. Project management topic will come up, as well, so execution, what he thinks about it since an idea without execution is like a child without growing up.
I met him at IFA Berlin in September this year at the HAX stand, as they're a graduate of this Nr 1 hardware accelerator's program. I liked their product very much, their really unique business model and their story.
Enjoy this episode and make sure you check out their (currently running) Kickstarter campaign.
Show highlights can be seen below:
This is Part 2 of my interview with Professor Günter Faltin, from Germany and at the same time a successful entrepreneur.
Briefly, I consider him as a kind of the German version of Tim Ferriss, as his book Brain vs capital is similarly influential in entrepreneurship in Germany, similarly to Tim Ferriss’ book especially in the US, but also worldwide.
You can learn in this episode why the MBA person often clashes with the entrepreneur, why a business plan is not actually a plan, what Prof. Faltin thinks about entrepreneurship, how it could be applicable for many of us. We talked also about outsourcing, what’s crucial about it, how it can work in expensive countries. We have many many more topics, including the “ultrafast round” with 4 short questions so here you go. Enjoy.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
My guest is Günter Faltin, professor of entrepreneurship from Germany and himself also a successful entrepreneur.
He’s an early pioneer of entrepreneurship education in Germany. He’s widely known in Germany because of his pioneering work connected to a concept called “component principle”. Last year I read his book “Brain vs capital” at around the same time as Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek book, and the connection between the two were obvious. Actually people in Germany buy these two books together, as I later found it out from Prof Faltin. Both books have been major eye-openers for me. Prof. Faltin and Tim Ferriss’ works are for ones who want to get results fast and sustainably, just prof. Faltin’s is more applicable exclusively to entrepreneurship. In the links below you can see actually an interview that Prof. Faltin did with Tim Ferriss, and it made me smile how much the two are in agreement.
Prof. Faltin is a very practical person despite being a professor. So by any means, he’s not sitting in his Ivory Tower. You’ll learn in this episode he’s had his quite successful business which is still thriving.
In this part 1 episode you can learn from Prof. Faltin how he systematically started his company, he’ll discuss his principles for how to stay lean and efficient even after the beginnings of a startup when one wants to scale. He’ll also bring up other examples besides for companies that use his principles. Enjoy.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
My interview guest is from the US from San Francisco, Nick Pinkston, founder and CEO of Plethora.
In case you’re into manufacturing, and you should be, if you’re into into hardware, then this episode is for you.
Nick is a central figure in hardware in the Bay Area which you’ll learn about in this interview. He’s behind CloudFab, the world's first manufacturing-as-a-service API, HackPittsburgh, a collective workshop for the makers of Pittsburgh and he’s co-founder of the San Francisco Meetup. These topics will all come up in this episode.
His latest venture is Plethora which provides rapid manufacturing services that give you real-time design feedback and pricing when you upload your 3D file. After this step, their on-demand automated factory programs itself to make your parts. He’s essentially transforming the way we do manufacturing via digital manufacturing.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
The interviewee, Mark Milstein, who I have in this episode is a very experienced serial-entrepreneur whose obsession is immersive media content. This includes VR, AR, 360 degree videos.
We talk about a topic that is often not talked about, that is what about the searchability of the immense amount of data you produce when recording immersive media?
Mark is an impressive person in digital photography, digital asset management (DAM), curation. He’s the founder of Microstocksolutions and DigitalContentSolutions, two of his latest companies which do DAM, curation, asset mgmt services for the visual media industry as well as Fortune 500 companies. Mark is also the founder of two of Central and Eastern Europe's most respected photo agencies, Northfoto and Red Dot. Red Dot was a significant company in that it was the region's first internet based photo agency.
In this episode Mark talks about what most companies, innovators concentrate on in immersive media field, what challenges he sees and how he wants to solve some of the problems of content creators. You can learn about his past as well, how his career naturally led up to this point and how his curiosity and lack of some knowledge actually helped him take risks others would not take. Enjoy this episode.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
My guest in this episode is Christian Smith, co-founder and President of TrackR. Their company is a startup based in California, outside Silicon Valley, at a remarkable place called Santa Barbara, and it is a quite successful hardware startup so lots of things to learn in this interview.
TrackR works in the intelligent personal item tracking space, so their products help you find your lost items. Since its start in 2009, it has grown tremendously from being a startup operating out of a garage to a global operation, with over five million devices shipped worldwide. TrackR is built into many products, as Christian explains it in this episode, from leading brands like Amazon, DoCoMo, HP, Cross Pens and more.
In this episode you get to hear the story of how they got their idea on the beach, what it entails to be passionate or obsessed about something. There are many many more topics we discussed as you can see below in the highlights.
Enjoy this episode.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
My guest this time is from Silicon Valley, USA, Vibhu Norby of b8ta.
This is an episode that you should simply not miss - many many things to learn from and a guest to inspire you. Vibhu was before with Nest, the smart thermostat maker. This is where he had the realization that retail is far from optimal and that one might have to rethink retail to bring it up to date, to capitalize on today’s tech capabilities. b8ta is essentially a software-powered retailer.
In this episode Vibhu talks about b8ta’s contrarian belief on why brick and mortar stores are dying, how they want to bring back customers to the stores, and what the best brands do. Nowadays e-commerce topics is stealing the headlines, but contrary to this, people actually buy products in stores. You can also learn about conflict of interest between brands and retailers and how Vibhu wants to solve this conflict with his company. You can also find out how he validated his idea, what mistake he made during this time. He also walks us through the process what details make your brand sell or not sell inside a store. And many more topics will be covered, too. Enjoy!
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
I’ve had a very special guest, who I got to talk to. My interviewee, Dr. Milton Chang, is a serial entrepreneur with an impressive, long track record of building hardware companies.
Milton is currently managing partner of Incubic Venture Fund. He was president of Newport and New Focus, which he took public. In addition, the companies he incubated resulted in six IPOs and close to 10 acquisitions. He currently works with several companies, including Aurrion (acquired by Juniper Networks), MBio Diagnostics, YesVideo, and Protein Fluidics. He’s a Trustee of the California Institute of Technology and has recently served on the SEC Advisory Committee on Small and Emerging Companies. He writes a business and management column for Laser Focus World.
Milton is also the author of Toward Entrepreneurship, a book that I consider as one of the best books on entrepreneurship - find out in this episode why.
You can find out in this episode what it means for him to found a company, to grow slowly or fast. You can also learn what you should pay attention to if you come out of academia to start a business, what separates a good from a bad business idea and many many more.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
My guest has recently been Scott N. Miller, co-founder and CEO of Dragon Innovation, a company based in the US helping hardware companies.
Scott has a pretty remarkable career behind him so far with at least two decades of experience in hardware field, so many of you have probably heard from him.
A few companies they have worked with are e.g. Pebble which was the topic of episode 8 of this podcast or Bose, the audio equipment company. We’ll discuss manufacturing in China vs in USA regarding salaries, unit numbers to work with, and also the future of manufacturing in China, as well as why the current trends can be beneficial to manufacturing in the US. Scott will elaborate also on their latest soon-to-be released software tool, and their latest announcement of a joint effort with Kickstarter. We have many more topics to cover so enjoy this episode.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
I’m back on the show, just me, and I’ll talk about an announcement, that is I’m changing the publishing frequency from weekly to bi-weekly.
Why do I do this?
I enjoy podcasting very much, it’s my passion, as well as helping you guys, connecting you with others and to sources of information. I love my guests as well and of course all of you, who take the time to listen to the episodes.
Instead of creating a kind of blog post out of answering the why question, I encourage you to listen to the episode as it’s a pretty short one - fast-forward it if you want to listen to it even faster.
Highlights can be seen below. A big thanks again for listening to this show! I can’t wait to bring you more inspiring guests and contents.
Further info at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
My guest is from the US, from Texas, Chris Hsiao, co-founder and leader of Gossamer, a startup for startups that became known for developing the Teal drone, the fastest production drone on Earth.
As for Gossamer, it is a full stack product design and engineering firm that focuses mainly on hardware startups. You’ll learn in this episode how Chris started his venture, their being acquired recently, the story of the Teal drone and another project that is important to him because of the potential impact.
Enjoy this episode.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
Again, I’ve interviewed Joshua Spodek, a professor at NYU and an entrepreneur. He was a guest in episode 22 of this podcast because of his hardware entrepreneurship background and his leadership teaching that we can all learn from. He’s back since we have something important to talk about which concerns Earth’s physical resources which I alluded to in episode 1 and I didn’t want to wait long to start to publicly discuss this topic.
Briefly about Josh: he’s a best-selling author (“Leadership Step by Step” book), holds five Ivy-League degrees, he runs regularly marathons, writes intensely (daily blog posts, articles on Inc magazine).
In this episode we’ll talk about leadership again but this time on applying it on one specific topic, on sustainability. We hear constantly about facts on climate change, the consequences of our not taking actions, the green technologies’ slow adoption. “If information was the answer, we’d all be millionaire with perfect abs” says Derek Sivers. Maybe there’s another, potentially more effective way to decrease climate change, by talking less and acting more, a certain point Josh makes, which he thinks has been almost completely overlooked.
Enjoy this episode.
Just one more thing since it’s a call to action: let me know or Joshua if you want to do something on this topic, e.g. joining an accountability group, or contributing in any way to this initiative.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
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
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:
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:
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
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
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
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:
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
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.