
Hardware, the Ugly Stepchild of Venture Capital, Is Having a Glamour Moment - cpeterso
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/hardware-funding/
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mtdev
Focusing on mainly on electronics, I will agree that hardware is having a
glamour moment, but not because more funding is available. I am an embedded
designer and I work closely with several hardware startups (in silicon valley
and other places) ranging from novel LED lighting to data acquisition systems.
Every one of those startups had to bootstrap themselves until they were
financially viable from sales before they were able to get any outside
investments. My sample size is small, however, the data agree five out of five
times.

The article is dead on with respect to the falling costs of prototyping, I
would also add the falling cost of integrated circuits in general. For
example, I can get high quality PCB prototypes for about $30 shipped in one
week (5cm x 5cm, two layer, 6/6/6 design rules). This was unheard of five
years ago. Furthermore, you can now get a 32-bit ARM processor (which doesn't
need many external components) in the same package as 8-bit microcontrollers
for about the same cost. You can run a open-source IP/USB/BT stack on those
without having to cobble together your own. Having the extra performance
available, at the low cost/high integration factor, allows the designer
similar agile capability as compared to lean software startups, where you can
use available code to prototype first and then optimize after you have your
feature set. This makes it easier to develop smarter devices that integrate
with a broader software stack, e.g. cloud connected embedded devices.

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arbuge
More correctly, electronics is having a glamour moment. VC money has poured
into hardware for a long time, if hardware is more broadly defined to include
semiconductors, biotech, etc. There's also quite a few VCs with solid
experience in those areas and hardware is all many of them do.

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jpdoctor
> _The old saw in Silicon Valley is that venture capitalists won’t touch
> hardware investments._

TIL that the _old saw_ is written by someone who's been around SV less than
ten years.

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tmh88j
I wonder if the author read PG's essay.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hw.html>

