Our fund, Founder Collective, isn't hardware-focused, but we have backed a lot of transformative hardware startups – E.g., Whoop, Formlabs, Cruise, Desktop Metal, Kinsa, Running Tide.
We've also backed a bunch that haven't been able to make it work. It's a tantalizing space, but wickedly hard. That said, we remain ever optimistic and if you're building something in hardware, please reach out – joeflaherty@foundercollective.com
I live in NH and the local amusement park, called Canobie Lake, has more rides and ride systems than the Magic Kingdom. The "themeing" isn't as nice but it's a fraction of the cost.
I like the Disney Parks, but you're really paying a heavy premium for IP and a potential visit with a Princess. For most people your local Six Flags will be a far better value for the dollar with not much of a dimunition of the experience.
My nine-year-old daughter has had cancer and been diagnosed with epilepsy and high-functioning autism. Despite these challenges...
+ Being a parent is fun. Kids are super funny. Teaching them stuff is a treat, and seeing their interests emerge is a wonderful feeling. Assuming you love your spouse, you get to see this chimera of the best parts of you and your partner walking around in the world.
+ Kids are also familial and social glue. Even if you live a ways from parents, it's an easy excuse to stay in touch, a place to plan trips. One of the crazy things that as your kids grow they look and sound like different relatives. It's a cool experience.
+ Selfishly, it's nice knowing you'll have some influence on the world, no matter how small, after you pass.
I'm know some childless billionaires and honestly I wouldn't trade the decade-long headstart I've had with my daughter and her brother for all their worldly fun. Everything people say about parenting being the best thing you'll ever do is right – and they're underselling it.
FWIW, I understand the cynicism. You seem like someone who has suffered through tough times. I hope you find peace.
Ecigs are likely one of the most impactful public health interventions of the last 50 years. They provide a substitute that is less dangerous and pleasurable which keeps compliance high.
Juul and their competitors were genius product managers paired with irresponsible to the point of malevolent product marketers.
I would like someone to do a "Years of life saved" calculation that tallies the expected years save by switching smokers to vaping balanced against those who were attracted by vaping who eventually went to smoking. My guess is even with the new entrants the years of life saved would be extraordinary.
> I would like someone to do a "Years of life saved" calculation that tallies the expected years save by switching smokers to vaping balanced against those who were attracted by vaping who eventually went to smoking. My guess is even with the new entrants the years of life saved would be extraordinary.
My understanding is entire high schools are getting addicted to vaping, where before smoking was a relatively minor phenomenon. I suspect vaping is causing multiple times as much harm as it is providing relief, especially since they target young people for new customers.
I know plenty of people that have never smoked in their lives that vape regularly. I actually don't know a single smoker that switched to vaping, but I think that latter part is rare and unique to me.
So, if I'm correct, I don't think it should be "years of life saved" but "years of life lost," and I'd bet it's astonishingly high since many of those high school kids will be addicted for life. Don't forget Juul got billions (not millions) in funding from the cigarette companies in exchange for 35% ownership, so it's all the same to them - addiction is money.
Yes, it seems like the elder generations are benefiting greatly from vaping but the "kids these days" are having huge issues with it. I agree that majority of a high school will just suddenly be all in on vaping, the social pressure is just waayyy too high in a place like that and a bunch of people get pulled in that wouldn't just cause a couple of the more influential ones picked up something they view as a toy, but that they can portray as a status symbol, at least within the high school.
I will say that when those juul kids come to college, very specifically my college, they hit the reality that everyone there still looks down on it and that they're basically just broadcasting their "highschoolness", and then they realize how hard it is to quit. We had smoking at my non-smoking campus, just behind one of the buildings, but it was by definition not popular. Vaping existed but if you were walking around blowing huge clouds of cotton candy shit, people would both actively avoid you and look down on you. It was the culture at the time.
Disclaimer: I left a couple years ago, that was my experience, things could've greatly changed by now
It's still a product using nicotine to form addiction so that you'll be reliant on their product, it's an evil practice. You can vape without nicotine, and it's a great way to quit smoking, but that's not what's happening with all the Juul hype. It's just teenagers getting hooked on nicotine again because marketing has told them it was cool.
It gets a pass because of it's relationship with smoking, giving them a believable reason to keep the nicotine, but if I started putting nicotine in bottled water there would be a class action in a week.
We don't have as much data on vaping as we do for smoking, but this reminds me of what cigarette companies said for decades: "where is the data showing our products are harmful?"
We already know vaping causes popcorn lung. I suspect 1:1 between vaping and smoking that vaping is safer, but who knows? We won't know until we have decades of data about mortality related to vaping. It seems plausible that it increases lung cancer rates and we just don't have enough data to know yet.
Not true. The data we have shows that it was being caused by Vitamin E acetate, which was used by off-brand THC cartridges. None of the major nicotine vapes used this chemical.
Also, this attitude of "oh we don't know" could be extended to any new product anywhere, including the vaccines we are using now. All of the current data supports vaping to be significantly safer than cigarettes, so let's proceed with that data and if the data later changes, we can update our guidelines.
Otherwise, you are killing people in the meantime.
> The data we have shows that it was being caused by Vitamin E acetate, which was used by off-brand THC cartridges.
That's a different, less well understood respiratory problem. Some ecigarette liquid contains (or used to contain; it's banned in Europe but maybe not in the US?) diacetyl as a flavouring; that causes popcorn lung and various other problems.
Regardless, neither of these are a concern where not present, which they generally aren't.
Well, there also incidents about 5 years of people making vape juice with Diacetyl, a food additive that gives a creamy buttery taste. Turned out that while it was food safe, bringing it to the temperature necessary for vaping did bad things to it and it also caused "popcorn lung"
> Otherwise, you are killing people in the meantime.
What? I'm arguing vaping is more dangerous than not vaping. I specifically said I believe vaping is safer than smoking.
For what it's worth, I believe all drugs should be legal. I don't care if you want to vape or not. I don't care if you want to inject fentanyl into your veins or not. It's your body.
"I suspect 1:1 between getting vaccinated and not, that getting vaccinated is safer, but who knows?"
See the problem with this type of rhetoric? There have been tons of studies done at this point with regards to vaping. Everything shows it as being safer. This is not equivalent to the tobacco companies lying to the public. Juul never makes any claim as to their product being 100% safe, just look at the packaging.
On top of that, you also repeated a known falsehood that vaping causes popcorn lung.
My point is that repeating these arguments and casting doubt on vaping being safer further promotes these bans on vaping, which in turn will kill more people.
> I'm arguing vaping is more dangerous than not vaping.
There is no need to argue an obvious fact that 100% of people will agree with.
You're comparing vaping to getting vaccinated. You've clearly got an axe to grind.
> There have been tons of studies done at this point with regards to vaping. Everything shows it as being safer.
I haven't seen them, but there were also lots of studies that cigarette companies touted to show how safe their product was until they could no longer deny it. And seeing as how those same companies just invested a shitload of money into Juul, it doesn't seem crazy to think they'd use the same playbook. We also have no reason to believe vaping isn't purposefully designed to get people hooked on nicotine only to later sell them another product like cigarettes or something else they later develop. In fact, there are studies suggesting exactly that (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6652100/). There are many ways vaping could prove to be more harmful than we can currently see because it's a relatively new product.
I get your point about vaping potentially being helpful by getting people off smoking if it's safer, but it's simply unproven. Like I said if people want to vape let them, but I'll wait for the data before concluding whether or not it's safer. I suspect it's more dangerous and I'm sticking to that until the data proves otherwise. Similar to how you suspect it's less dangerous and will stick to that until the data proves otherwise. The common thread is we're lacking data and neither of us can confirm our hypotheses.
In other words we disagree and it's impossible to know who's right until we have more data. From my perspective your stance is just as harmful as you perceive mine to be.
> You're comparing vaping to getting vaccinated. You've clearly got an axe to grind.
Not sure what you mean by this, but I think everyone should be vaccinated unless you have some health condition that prevents you from doing so.
The reason I'm making that comparison is that there is an ongoing public debate about vaccines and long-term health effects that use very similar arguments to yours. All of our current data shows that getting vaccinated is a better risk tradeoff than potentially getting covid. Just like all of our current data shows that vaping is safer than smoking. Both of the counter arguments center around "but we don't know what the long term effects are" and can be applied to both these new vaccines and to vaping.
I understand the point you're making but I don't think you understand the point I'm making. If it turns out vaping is a net positive for society then I will genuinely be happy that you were right and I was wrong.
I've seen countless people replace smoking with vaping and the massive benefits it has had on their physical health. So yeah, it pains me to see the push to ban the only working smoking alternative.
Not implying that you wanna ban it, but that's the reason why I'm so in favor of it.
We know that vaping fluid with a particular flavoring chemical caused popcorn lung. That chemical is now rare.
"The chemical that gave this condition its nickname is diacetyl. After workers at a factory that packaged microwave popcorn were found to have bronchiolitis obliterans more often than other people, some companies stopped using diacetyl as a flavoring. But it's still used in some electronic cigarette flavors in the US. Many e-cigarette makers state they aren't using this chemical in their products and its use in e-cigarettes is banned in Europe." (https://www.webmd.com/lung/popcorn-lung#1)
"My understanding is entire high schools are getting addicted to vaping, where before smoking was a relatively minor phenomenon. I suspect vaping is causing multiple times as much harm as it is providing relief, especially since they target young people for new customers."
I think I'd want a citation for that. It's been a long time since I was in high school, but smoking was incredibly common (if reasonably well concealed) back then. I can see vaping as being somewhat more popular (if not "entire high schools"), but...
I suspect you are right about the age division, but would love to see some real numbers and studies about each side. Every study I have seen about the youth pushes your sentiment that "entire high schools are getting addicted", but when you look at the questions, they are typically very misleading and something along the lines of "have you ever tried a vape".
OTOH, being older, I have never met someone who vapes that didn't smoke before, and know several smokers who quit and switched over.
Separating worthy designs from wasteful ones is essentially impossible. I spent the first ten years of my career designing medical devices and worked with a wide range of suppliers. One of our key vendors also did a lot of work designing airtight containers for chewing tobacco.
This is true up the entire supply chain. The same machines that produce barrier plastics for first responders also produce material for plastic wrap for retail packaging.
Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations.
The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.
Banning stuff is rarely my preferred solution. My take on producer responsibility is that producers should be prepared to take their stuff BACK - meaning, if someone turns up at their headquarters (or some more reasonable location) with a dump truck full of, for example, empty coffee cups, they should be required to accept the delivery and find a way to dispose of it, paying for landfill if necessary, but hopefully something more constructive. I just want the cost of disposal to come straight back to them.
The coffee cup example is contrived, but let's say every producer of plastic zip ties was required to receive returned plastic zip ties each year, equal to the volume that they sold the previous year?
>Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations.
>The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.
That is a false dilemma. You might as well start adding uranium to baby powder because "Uranium Co spends so much money on cancer research the real trade off isn't uranium baby powder or regular baby powder, it's uranium baby powder or oncology".
I invite you to spend some time in a pediatric oncology unit, look at the mind-boggling variety of single-use plastics consumed over the course of the day, and research their manufacturers and origins. The results will be more illuminating than some dramatic hypothetical.
Yeah, perhaps they can use catgut or something as a replacement for central lines. Waxed paper is well known to have the same antimicrobial attributes as hydrophobic plastics. All but for the greed of Exxon...
To scare and threaten people with a near collapse of the medical device industry, if packaging manufacturers aren't allowed to operate unregulated, sounds like borderline lobbyist desperation tactics.
That is largely not the case. I spent ten years making private label medical devices for CVS, Kroger, Target, and dozens of other stores.
There tend to be specialist manufacturers who fill the store brand niches. E.g. in pharma, close to 90% of the pills, tabs, and liquids sold in front of the pharmacy counter are made by one company, Perrigo, whose entire model is predicated on being a store brand supplier.
I don't think Kimberly Clark makes the store brand paper products, nor does P&G make the store brand beauty/cleaning supplies.
And I can give an opposite case. I used to work for a large 1st-tier manufacturer of consumer batteries (hearing aid, AA, 9V, etc etc).
We were constantly competing with the other manufacturers for the Wal-Mart, Walgreens, CVS, etc white label brands. It was increased volume for our plants and they would usually suck up surplus supply.
The catch was that your contract was continually up for renewal and you had to beat the others on price and other criteria. After all, nobody else would know that the rack at Wag's was half-bunny and half-coppertop, right?
It was also a headache because defective parts and customer complaints counted against you hard. We actually tested our white label products more than the name brand SKUs.
I work in this industry as well. That said - private label is a small (but growing) area in the US markets, so it's hard to make a generalized statement of how much someone does or does not participate.
Many retailers are beginning tie production of private labeled products in with being the captain of a category - which begins to create incentive for companies to start to pursue these private label opportunities.
K-C and P&G are two examples of companies who largely resist the private label trends in the US - you could counter with ConAgra and Treehouse.
A lot of that has to do with the product and what-not, of course.
One of my favorite hypothetical questions is "Would you take a deal where you could 10X your salary, but you'd have to live the rest of your days starting in 1979."
Imagine all the same tech is available at the same periods in time, but produced by different companies so you can't do the "Back to the Future Sports Almanac" thing.
Imagine you're 40 today. Would you rather have 10X as much money, but know you won't get Aol until your 55? No smartphones until you qualify for Social Security? Maybe 10X is worth it, but 5X? 2X? It helps put the value we get from the web in perspective.
Just once, I'd love to read a story about tech in a major pub from the perspective of someone 35-55-ish who remembers the pre-internet world — and can't stop raving about how much better everything is now.
I get that it might not be a majority position, but it's not insignificant, but it's almost entirely invisible in the NYT's tech coverage.
Moreover, I find it crazy how every misstep of American tech companies portends the end of democracy, but they have the gall to write: "In China, a whole new internet is flowering."
Really it isn't crazy but low level dickery of "they are competing with us stop that". If you replace "end democracy" as "end our company's influence on it beyond one vote per person" you'll get a way more accurate picture of what all vested interest are saying.
The harsh truth is that they still sucked before the internet if not worse. It is just that a middle or high school student could prove them woefully inaccurate with low level basics with an internet connection. Hell any teenager could ask them how goddamn dumb do they think they are about the moral panics flat out made up by them or credelously accepted like rainbow parties. Even the cool dude would gotten have bullshit claimed about getting seven different girls with color coordinated lipstick to blow him. And this isn't a purposely absurd rhetorical anecdote - these are real claims!
Nobody is flawless here - I believe the proper model is freedom of the press and calling out when the press is total fucking bullshit and letting it go out of business on its own.
That's a great hypothetical, but not because it's a no-brainer. I'd have to think long and hard about that choice.
Sure, we have vast amounts of knowledge and entertainment at our fingertips, but the reality is that most of us are spending our days staring at Facestagram and binge watching Netflix.
Having enough money to be able to retire after a couple years and then spending the rest of my life traveling the world and reading every book I can doesn't sound so unenlightened in comparison.
1979 - !? Your challenge might pose a dilemma if you said 1879 or 1479 - but 1979 was just yesterday. Instead of Hacker News, you would have Usenet. Instead of Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple you would have IBM and DEC ... and Microsoft and Apple. Instead of programming in Javascript and Python and Lisp and C you would use BASIC and Pascal ... and Lisp and C. Instead of running on Windows or Linux it would run on VMS or Unix.
For HN readers, what makes an era's technology appealing are the opportunities it presents to be creative and make a contribution. By that measure 1979 was not worse than today, in some ways it was more interesting because there was more variety and it wasn't clear which few technologies would shake out. Look at a 1979 issue of BYTE - in addition to Apple and Microsoft there were hundreds of other companies of similar size pursuing promising, eccentric, and/or dead-end ideas.
For another view of computing as seen from the 1970s, including many roads not taken, see Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming": http://worrydream.com/dbx/
> Instead of running on Windows or Linux it would run on VMS or Unix.
And that means it would be in some institution or company, rather than in your home.
The big difference in 1979 would be that the consumer computing hardware available then was poorly affordable even for consume hardware, and terribly under-powered.
If you wanted to do anything beyond dinking around with some 1Mhz 8-bit processor with a few kilobytes of RAM, and weren't rich, you would only have access to decent hardware through work or school.
Sure, but none of that prevented you from creating and inventing and just having fun. It was an exciting time because microprocessors had just appeared and it wasn't yet clear what all might be done with them. People did amazing things with those 8 bit processors - do you think Woz and Gates were just dinking around?
If you were interested in computing it wasn't so hard to get yourself to a company or school that would provide access. They didn't stop you from creating and inventing.
Nowadays computing is more dominated by a few large companies and institutions than it was then. Do you really
own, control, understand, and trust your phone and other gadgets as well as they did then with their 8 bit processors?
Woz and Jobs quit decent jobs and had to sell belongings to fund their project.
Gates had access to mainframe computers capable of running an emulator of the 8 bit systems he was targeting, using which he was able to debug his BASIC interpreters.
> If you were interested in computing it wasn't so hard to get yourself to a company or school that would provide access.
And as for the rest, why they could just get a terminal with a 110 baud acoustically-coupled modem and try their luck breaking in.
Nobody was going to let you near equipment costing 100K's of dollars, without credentials, and even then, it would have been be difficult to use the equipment for hobby projects.
Define better... Of course we know more now and knowing enough about the future, even if worthless, would potentially be frustrating to no end. Also the cultural clash.
Are we happier now? And would even a 2x salary not offset the worries one might have?
The world has matured a lot but if you have good income in a rich country you are in a pretty good place.
If your entire career or hobby doesn't exist yet I don't think that will make for a happy ending. Not that you can't pivot of course but that might be a gamble.
Back to the Future used Sports Almanac to cater to the average no skills Joe off the street watching a fun movie. Here on HN most people have something much more valuable in their heads already, technical knowledge. 1979? I code rudimentary VisiCalc, or dBase, or WordStar, or even all in one competitor in couple of weeks and build a $10 million company in a year. There are hundreds of similar essential business ideas to be realized in the past.
I would have money to go on fancy ski trips, golf every weekend, eat fancy dinners, hike in exotic places. I could drive my dream car, etc.. etc.. I would also be able to retire early.
There are definitely many non-computer related hobbies to keep me interested.
- Assuming I get to work in the same industry, the opportunity to work full-time as a systems programmer on 1979-era tech
- Better weather
- More affordable housing
- Getting to live through the 80s as they happened
Even if the deal is altered so that magically the only difference between 1979 and now is the tech landscape - the first two items are compelling enough on their own.
Do you know anybody with a time machine that can hook me up?
Veeva raised $4M in VC to build CRM for life sciences and currently has a $21B market cap. It's one of the 15 or so best exits of the last decade.
I agree that comparing biology today to transistors in the 1950s might seem hubristic. But even if you don't buy that, I would bet on the notion that there are pretty massive opportunities at the intersection of tech and bio.
I work in Boston and there's tremendous activity in the life science space, as traditionally defined. Doesn't seem crazy to believe that market could support many billion-dollar companies that build picks and shovels.
This is an often stated criticism of modern Lego designs, but I wonder if anyone has tried to test this empirically?
E.g. if you gave a group of kids a "classic" set and another a themed set, with no further instructions, would the first group produce more "creative" designs?
I think the critics of the branded sets undervalue the Piagetian concept of scaffolding, basically that having the Harry Potter superstructure allows kids to riff on a variety of concepts that actually may be more "creative" than the random geometric blocks.
E.g. "What if we built a jail around Voldermort instead of killing him" seems like an equally valuable expression of creativity as "I made a vaguely car-shaped thing, but it has six wheels instead of four and has those little lever bricks instead of a steering wheel."
We've also backed a bunch that haven't been able to make it work. It's a tantalizing space, but wickedly hard. That said, we remain ever optimistic and if you're building something in hardware, please reach out – joeflaherty@foundercollective.com