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Founders, Beware Hardware – Alex Kolchinski

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Hardware startups are sexy. Building flying cars, nuclear reactors, or electric cars is more tangible and in many ways more interesting than writing software. It’s also possible to tackle a wider range of important problems with hardware than with software alone, from global warming to food security. For these reasons, many founders and would-be founders dream of starting hardware companies, and some of them actually do. Occasionally, that decision works out reasonably well, but most of the time, it ends in tears, especially for founders without previous successful outcomes. This is due to factors inherent to hardware companies, which the startup community is somewhat aware of but perhaps not enough. In this essay, I’m hoping to make those factors clear, with the hopes of saving other founders future pain. This warning comes out of my own story. I’m from a software background — I started programming as a teenager, studied computer science and AI in college and in grad school, and have

Founders, Beware Hardware – Alex Kolchinski Founders, Beware Hardware This essay is part of a 3-part series : The End of Knowledge Work The End of the Software Industry Founders, Beware Hardware Hardware startups are sexy. Building flying cars, nuclear reactors, or electric cars is more tangible and in many ways more interesting than writing software. It’s also possible to tackle a wider range of important problems with hardware than with software alone, from global warming to food security. For these reasons, many founders and would-be founders dream of starting hardware companies, and

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