
Radicand Is a Radical New Collaboratory for Hardware Startups - fictivmade
https://www.fictiv.com/resources/spotlight/hardware-lessons-from-radicand
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mcantelon
TLDR: Radicland is a makerspace run by a hardware incubator? Too many
buzzwords and passionate endorsements of the obvious to make this a compelling
interview.

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msandford
It's a great idea, but I doubt it'll scale. That doesn't mean I don't wish
them the best, and really hope to be wrong. But they face an uphill battle to
make it as a startup-startup.

If it works there'll be a bunch of competitors that will pop up. Sure a bunch
of them will just cargo-cult and not understand _why_ they're supposed to do
things a certain way, but plenty of them will understand.

The other problem is that these guys could make their own product and once
they do that, they're probably out of the "helping other people create
products" business.

Finally if competitors don't spring up and they do somehow manage to capture
enough mindshare to keep people beating a path to their door it's going to be
tough to keep hiring VP-product kinds of guys and employing them and not
having them get poached.

It's possible to do this of course, just look at Bill Gross' Idealab:
[http://www.idealab.com/](http://www.idealab.com/)

If you compare the track records of Idealab and YC, I suspect that YC is
coming out ahead at least in terms of financials. Idealab might have happier
employees versus the difficult grind that founders face and that's not
necessarily good or bad, just different. But I really do suspect that YC is a
better model if you're in it for the returns.

[http://www.idealab.com/our_companies/show/all](http://www.idealab.com/our_companies/show/all)

[http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/)

I suspect that while difficult they could make something like Idealab work for
hardware, but I have no idea how they'd make something like YC work for
hardware. But I think you have to if you want to make a real business out of
it, or else just making your own product will be way, way more profitable than
continuously doing it for other people.

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RadicandLab
Hi all, thanks for your comments. To address a few of your questions: (1) we
are opening a new facility in SoMa, SF next month. (2) we are actively scaling
our team & resources to meet demand. (3) we work actively with teams in YC,
Highway1, StartX, and others. These are valuable partnerships for us & our
portfolio start-ups. (Not competitors.) (4) we are more incubator than
makerspace. But we do have shared unrestricted access to prototyping tools &
eqpt for our portfolio companies.

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trevyn
Wow, it took way too long to figure out what I wanted to know: Radicand is in
Redwood City, CA.

