

How Hardware Startup Accelerators Surprised Me - emilyn
http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2014/8/how-hardware-startup-accelerators-surprised-me

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paulgerhardt
Where an accelerator provides value is in network.

Going through a program like YC one takes it as a matter of course that the
software gets written. It's almost assumed to be a downhill process. The hard
part that gets hammered into you is Growth - the program is by and large a
merciless, insanely purpose driven, bootcamp-come-network for Growth.
Prototypes in, hockey sticks out.

With hardware there is an incircuitable field of well documented terrors,
known to be fatal, that stands between conceiving a product and releasing it.
The added value of a hardware startup accelerator than is being your Westley
when you need to get through the Trough of Fire Swamps. In many cases it's
simply plugging you into the group of vendors that can scale parts,
manufacturing, and fulfillment - for much of it, what you don't know will kill
you and no one person or company knows it all – that's why it takes a network.

Simplified: Hardware accelerators are cool because they are providing value
where no one else is (solving the trough of sorrow problem by creating
fungible networks). Y Combinator is cool because it pioneered the same thing
for growth.

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MattGrommes
I'm still surprised there isn't a popular company to help these hardware
startups with all the myriad choices you have to make in hardware. There's so
much that can screw you up in component choices, board printing, plastics,
etc. that have no mirror in software.

~~~
HardwareLover
There are many companies currently doing that. One of them is HWTrek, an
ecosystem with a community of mentors helping hardware startups from product
development to mass production to shipping. The platform has elements of
Alibaba and LinkedIn, and hardware developers can search for supply chain
vendors, manufacturers, software/cloud vendors, VCs, etc. on it.

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kfihihc
Hardware startup never like software startup, because hardware product built
by the whole ecosystem, such as supplier, manufacturer, etc. And software is
built by your laptop. :)

~~~
ibisum
I find it nevertheless amusing that there is some sort of 'special' line in
the sand between these apparently two 'divergent fields of focus', because
with all computing, from day one, you can't run your software on thin air.
(Not yet anyway.) Hardware is where all computing starts - at the very off-
switch, which is a physical device. As is all software too, a physical device.
You can't have it in the ether .. well you can, and in fact 'the ether' is all
software really is, but nevertheless: those bits don't charge/discharge
themselves. Well, they do, but.. its a physical thing, dictated across the
universe by the distance between a working computer and its conscious user. No
user: no usage. No computer: no use. Software can be composed of anything
possible between the distance of two real, physical points in the universe:
Computer, user. And software always, always, depends on both entities being
functionally operational.

The point being, all software efforts are hardware efforts too, whether its
considered relevant or not to the budget-sheets being run by the economics of
the activity, but in the case where hardware is being designed, built, shipped
and used by a customer base, there are some tight ropes to walk.

