- The speaker, Eric, is a YC partner and the former CEO and founder of Pebble.
- They discuss the process of coming up with the name Pebble for their product.
- The speaker then talks about their experience running a hardware startup, particularly in the area of hard tech.
- They applied to YC in 2008 and started working on the company while still in school.
- Pebble had shipped around 200-300 units before joining YC.
- They faced challenges in manufacturing, but the ability to iterate quickly helped them overcome these issues.
- Pebble continued to manufacture by hand until they reached around 700-800 units.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of not letting external opinions discourage them and maintaining naivety in their approach.
- They mention a mistake they made after YC, investing all their money in inventory instead of raising more funds.
- Despite facing ups and downs, Pebble eventually found success after five years of hard work.

- The speaker shares their experience of manufacturing a product and facing challenges such as delays and increased costs.
- They emphasize the importance of frugality and being resourceful, especially when starting with limited funds.
- Crowdfunding can be useful at two specific points in a startup's life: raising funds for a working prototype or using it as a marketing and sales channel.
- The speaker advises against starting with a big marketing campaign and suggests testing product-market fit with friends and family first.
- They recommend exploring niche crowdfunding platforms and communities instead of relying solely on popular platforms like Kickstarter.
- It is important to have confidence in the ability to deliver the product before using crowdfunding platforms that focus on shipping.
- The speaker highlights the value of finding early customers in online communities and earning credibility before targeting early adopters.
- When it comes to outsourcing, having flexible technical team members who can handle various tasks is preferable to working with contractors or consultants.
- The speaker acknowledges the importance of incorporating software components into hardware products to enable scalability and subscription services.

- The speaker discusses the importance of having the right business model for long-term growth and funding.
- They mention different business models that can be used by hardware companies, such as subscription services.
- The speaker reflects on their own experience with a hardware company and how they struggled with understanding their business model in a hits-driven market.
- They talk about the challenges of rapid iteration cycles in hard tech companies due to hardware constraints or regulatory issues.
- The speaker advises that early-stage companies should focus on sales and customer feedback rather than solely building a prototype.
- They share an example of a company that shifted their focus to sales and achieved significant success within a short period of time.
- The speaker offers advice to scientists and engineers considering commercializing their work, emphasizing the importance of sales and customer engagement.

- The speaker discusses the pros and cons of starting a company in a university town versus Silicon Valley
- They encourage entrepreneurs to get out of their comfort zone and engage with customers and conferences
- The speaker highlights the importance of not needing a large amount of funding to develop a product and cites examples of successful companies that started with minimal investment
- They mention the company Relativity Space, which built 3D printed rockets and found success through demonstrating their vision and passion
- The speaker advises finding initial customers by infiltrating communities that would be interested in the product and utilizing press and media opportunities

- The author suggests that software engineers can start by finding an off-the-shelf product that is halfway to what they want to build, saving time and money.
- They recommend buying a product and using it to solve the problem, as it may reveal that the intended solution is not effective.
- The next step is to modify the product to improve it, such as adding technology or changing the setup.
- Examples are given of companies that successfully used this approach, such as scooter sharing companies and a security camera company.
- The author advises not to try to build everything from scratch or hire expensive design and engineering firms.
- The question of whether to move closer to factories or customers is discussed, with the answer depending on the specific situation.
- The topic of protecting products through patents and other means is addressed, with the author suggesting that building a strong product and creating network effects or data lock-in are more effective than relying on patents.
- The importance of starting with a small market and having a roadmap for growth is emphasized.
- The question of choosing a recurring business model or selling the product is discussed, with the recommendation to price the product based on the savings or additional revenue it provides to the customer.

- Pricing should be set as high as possible while still allowing customers to save money and ensuring the company earns profit
- Experimentation with pricing is possible for small companies, as new customers won't know the previous prices
- Hiring and scaling a company can be challenging, but hiring for trust and reliability is more important than specific domain knowledge
- Hiring people you know, such as friends or former colleagues, can be a quick and effective way to build a team
- When deciding whether to involve hardware or software in solving a problem, start by testing if the problem can be solved with existing off-the-shelf hardware
- For complex products, it may be beneficial to create a software version or use off-the-shelf devices to demonstrate the concept before investing in custom hardware
- Financing for hardware companies is often needed for inventory, and pre-orders from customers can be a way to fund development without relying on VC funding or bank loans
- Reducing lead times for product development can also help minimize the need for inventory financing.

Reducing lead times can benefit businesses by requiring less cash investment in inventory that takes months to generate revenue. It may be advantageous to pay more for products with shorter lead times in order to alleviate cash flow problems. This can involve earning less profit per unit but reducing upfront risk. These are some key insights on hardware financing.

- Eric, a YC partner and former CEO of Pebble, discusses the process of naming their product and their experience running a hardware startup.
- Pebble faced challenges in manufacturing but overcame them through quick iteration and perseverance.
- The importance of not letting external opinions discourage them and maintaining naivety is emphasized.
- Mistakes were made after YC, such as investing all their money in inventory instead of raising more funds.
- Despite ups and downs, Pebble eventually found success after five years of hard work.
- The importance of frugality, resourcefulness, and finding early customers in online communities is highlighted.
- Having a flexible technical team and incorporating software components into hardware products is advised.
- The right business model and understanding the market are crucial for long-term growth and funding.
- Challenges of rapid iteration cycles in hard tech companies are discussed, and the focus on sales and customer feedback is recommended.
- Scientists and engineers considering commercializing their work should prioritize sales and customer engagement.
- The pros and cons of starting a company in a university town versus Silicon Valley are discussed.
- Examples are given of successful companies that started with minimal investment and infiltrated communities to find initial customers.
- Starting with an off-the-shelf product and modifying it is recommended, rather than building everything from scratch.
- The question of whether to move closer to factories or customers depends on the situation.
- Building a strong product and creating network effects are suggested as more effective means of protection than relying on patents.
- Starting with a small market and having a roadmap for growth is emphasized.
- Pricing should be based on the savings or additional revenue provided to the customer.
- Hiring for trust and reliability is more important than specific domain knowledge.
- Financing for hardware companies can be obtained through pre-orders from customers and reducing lead times for product development.

YC Partner Adora Cheung talks to Pebble founder and YC Partner Eric Migicovsky about hard tech.

Learn more at https://startupschool.org

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) -
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:37 How did you end up with the name Pebble?
00:01:52 Quick story of when you came to YC? How big were you? What did you do in YC?
00:03:29 So $15,000 thousand dollars let you manufacture, was it the first 100 units?
00:05:38 How many units had you sold before you actually went through the entire manufacturing process? 700 to 800 units
00:05:58 What happens if I  have to move my business to Mountain View? Its gonna interrupt my production process
00:06:44 Hardest part in the whole journey with Pebble?
00:08:28 But now that you've done it do you think it's possible now?
00:10:50 It's often people get really creative with no money but forget once raised money
00:12:14 Advise on right time to do crowdfunding campaign, is a real product required and should it align with the campaign?
00:16:00 In the first route, delivery of product within six months is unknown. Should I use crowdfunding platform only if I know I can deliver?
00:16:53 Sometimes there's a group (Facebook, Subreddits) before the early adopters on Kickstarter
00:17:27 What's the right call in terms of outsourcing the various components?
00:19:46 Belief in “hardware without software (subscription instead of one off)” and thoughts on people who say that?
00:23:11 How do you define hard tech, deep tech? What does that really involve?
00:24:35 Crazy rocket idea but have no money, where do I even start? What do I do?
00:24:53 What will be an MVP in this case?
00:26:51 What do you encourage startups accomplish by demo day?
00:27:45 Sales and talking to users gives more confidence that your on the right track
00:29:58 Advice to scientist in Ph.Ds. at school who want to make the jump and commercialize their product. What should they consider?
00:32:15 Users interested in your product but need lot of money. What do you need to show to investors?
00:33:59 What's an idea that sounded so crazy when you heard but when you met the founder you were like this is totally possible?
00:37:17 Q1 - How do you get your first customers? How do you get 1-50?
00:39:40 Q2 - Bunch of software engineers, we have an idea that includes software and hardware, how do we get started on the hardware?
00:42:55 Q3 - Pre product market fit, do you recommend move closer to suppliers?
00:44:12 Q4 - Do we have to protect (IP/Trademark) our products or how can we protect?
00:47:02 Q5 - Building Hard-Tech and solving a long term problem but first problem looks too small? Marginal markets are great
00:48:58 Q6 - Should I pick a recurring business model or just sell the product?
00:50:48 Q7 - How do you do hiring, especially when you're scaling?
00:54:23 Q8 - For some project problems, they can be solved exclusively by software, how do you know when to involve hardware in it?
00:56:05 Q9 - How do we demo really complex product or how do we convey it to people?
00:57:21 Q10 - Why hardware companies need financing?

He was previously the CEO and founder of Pebble, which went through the YC batch in all the way winter of 2011.

So now we have the other building on the other side, but my YC batch was 1 of the last ones in this small building.

You actually applied, it was called Alerta when you applied?

We had a whole bunch of complicated names.

How did you, I mean Pebble's a great name, how did you eventually end up on there?

I think the original names were found using a thesaurus or some sort of like, we just like scanned through a book for words that were related to like alerting, alerta, that was how we got to it.

I actually thought of it while lying on a beach and it was like 2 years before we actually made Pebble.

And I just wrote it down in Evernote on a list of good names.

You have no idea when you're gonna use another name, so if you think of any good ones, just write them down.

So today I want to spend a little time talking about hardware startups, given you ran 1, especially 1 that was 1 of the larger hardware startups in the past few years, but then spend a bulk of the time talking about hard tech, because you spend a lot of time working with hard tech, or deep tech, whatever you want to call it.

And there are a lot of unknowns still out there and we obviously want to fund more of those kind of startups.

So starting with Pebble, so can you take us through like a quick story of you know when you came to YC, how big were you, what did you do in YC, like That's actually a common question of what hard core startups actually do with YC in 3 months.

So we applied to YC, started the company in 2008.

Started working on it while I was still a student at Waterloo.

We hadn't actually shipped, or we were just starting to ship the product to first customers, this is before Pebble, back in mid 2010, and I'd been on Hacker News forever, but I never really understood what Y Combinator was.

I just thought it was like the domain name for Hacker News.

And 1 day someone said, hey, you should check out YC.

The video we recorded, if I look back at it, was during Oktoberfest in Kitchener-Waterloo where I was living and we were wearing like Oktoberfest hats in the video.

Paul Graham, Jessica, and the gang decided to accept us even though I think we were the third hardware company that had gone through.

We started YC in 2011 in the winter and the stage of the company was we had shipped maybe I think 200 or 300 of our very first watch, the watch that was called Impulse that worked with Blackberry smartphones.

We were getting money, but we were earning some money.

I think I borrowed $15,000 from my parents, got some government grants in Canada, which was quite easy.

But we hadn't raised any money from investors.

So $15,000 let you manufacture these at the first 100 units?

We ended up making them 1 by 1, actually.

So the first watches for this first watch, they were manufactured, we bought the circuit boards from China.

We had the metal, the kind of metal casing of the watch made at a small metal shop.

A guy had a CNC, a five-axis CNC printer or a mill and he actually just like he read about us in the school newspaper or something like that and offered to like be our first shop for making the actual metal cases.

So metal case would get made just a couple blocks away.

We'd get the circuit boards shipped in from China.

We also made the plastic watch straps in China.

And then we would do the final assembly 1 by 1 in the garage.

And I think that early process of making everything 1 by 1 was perfect for us because we screwed up everything you could possibly screw up.

In the first 10 watches, we had a lot of problems.

We couldn't get the signal out of the watch because it's like a Faraday cage sitting on your wrist.

And so we said, well, maybe let's change the metal back for a plastic back.

And so we had a whole bunch of laser-cut acrylic, you know, sheet plastic cut to the same size as the back of the watch, and we kind of jammed it in and then we shipped the first 10 of them out by FedEx and on something like 7 out of the 10 the electronics just exploded out the back of the plastic and like people would show us pictures of like this watch that they just bought with the guts just everywhere.

We started putting a piece of foam rubber inside the watch.

When we shipped it, the backs wouldn't explode.

But it was a really good thing that we were making them 1 by 1 or else we could have potentially made like hundreds with that same problem right at the beginning and had lost, you know, basically everything.

So we, I think we iterated really, really quickly and we, when we screwed up, it was only a maximum of like a pretty small screw up.

And how many units were you, had you sold before you actually went through the entire manufacturing process?

We continued to manufacture 1 by 1 by hand up until around 700, 800 units.

So 1 of the things that people ask often about YC is like, well, what happens if I have to move my business to Mountain View?

You know, it's going to interrupt my production process or whatever.

So what we did was I hired a couple high school students and I asked 1 of my friends who I went to school with who was doing his masters back at Waterloo to just kind of like manage and run the production thing and they would ship them down here and we would finish it in our house that we were all living at.

So I think the trick there was, we didn't let the fact that we had to be here in Mountain View interrupt our actual sales process.

And so after YC, Pebble obviously took off and lots of great things happened.

What were the, I mean you went through lots of ups and downs.

It was a year after YC, it wasn't like immediately after.

Yeah, so what was the hardest part maybe out of your whole journey with Pebble?

Looking back I think it's different because you know seeing it forward, it actually took us a long time to get from the initial idea to any sort of like real product market fit.

So we started the company in 2008, built the initial prototype late 2008-2009, didn't start shipping until 2010, and that was for our first watch.

And then we had a lot of lessons learned from that first production run and then we redesigned and created what would become Pedal in 2012.

And the hardest thing, like I mean obviously we work with a lot of founders and the hardest question that I think I ever get as someone who helps startups is like, how do I know that what I'm working on is the right thing to work on?

How do I know that this little pivot that I could do is not the right 1?

And so I, you know, thinking back, I think I was probably very misguided in that I just had faith and I just never gave up even though now thinking back it's insane doing something for 5 years like what's the definition of insanity doing the same thing and hoping for different results.

I guess we didn't know what we didn't know.

And we didn't know that you're not supposed to make consumer hardware products on a budget of $40,000.

Like most electronics that you use are made with budgets of millions of dollars.

But now that you've done it, or you did do it, do you think it's possible now?

What I'm saying is I think the hardest part that we had to go through was not letting other people get us down and kind of maintaining that naivety.

1 of the things that I really love about that phase of the startup was people couldn't really convince us that what we were doing was wrong because no 1 had really done it before and if people said like, oh, you know, you should, you know, you should look at raising more money or something like that, we didn't really have the resources to do that.

Like We were a very constrained, naive team and so we had to figure it out.

I think some of the ways that I could have screwed it up was, actually the ways that I did screw it up was right after YC, we raised a bit of money, about $250,000, including this large check that we got from 1 investor.

I took all that money and invested it in inventory because I thought at the time the biggest constraint on us growing was we didn't have a large amount of inventory.

And I was under the mistaken impression that if we could start selling it in real time rather than saying we'll do a pre-order and sell it to you in a couple weeks, that our sales would have taken off more.

We manufacture, instead of making them by hand, you know, in our garage, we went to a small contract manufacturer in San Jose and manufactured 3,000 at once and spent all of our money on that.

And you can all see that the story's going, it takes longer than you expect to bring up a new manufacturer.

So it took 6 months or 8 months instead of 3 months.

It cost more than we expected, so the bomb cost rose.

And then by the time we actually manufactured them, that 8 months rolled around, our email list of potential customers had kind of dried up.

Everyone had switched from Blackberry to using iPhones, and then we were stuck with a whole bunch of inventory.

So yeah, that was a really rough, difficult part.

Yeah, it's often, not always, but in many cases, people get really creative when they don't have much money.

And then when they raise a ton of money, they forget how to do that.

And it happened to me again, like 3 years later.

We raised a bunch of money and then started hiring.

And this is a big problem that even mostly the successful companies run into.

And so I think the moral of the story for me, at least, how I think about projects that I work on is like that frugality is vital to me.

Not everyone has the same, and not every industry is exactly the same.

There's a few crazy industries right now, which are kind of, by definition, the opposite of frugal.

I'm thinking of like the scooter share companies, where it's a matter of like raising as much money as physically possible.

But for The vast majority of people, like staying frugal is what actually like...

Yeah, if you don't have network, like obvious network effects or first mover advantage, then usually you should go down the other path.

So Pebble is known as 1 of the most, you did 1 of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter.

And so a lot of people view crowdfunding as a way in lieu of fundraising to do that route.

So I think there are a lot of questions on when is the right time to do it, especially like, at what point do I need a product that is real and it works?

Do I need to align that with the crowdfunding campaign and so forth?

I have a, after having gone through a couple of these cycles.

I think crowdfunding can be useful for 2 specific points, mainly useful for 2 specific points in a startup's life.

You could use crowdfunding at the very early stage when you have an idea on the back of a napkin, maybe a render or 2, to raise $25,000, $50,000 that can help you get to a working prototype.

This is for people who are software engineers and are experimenting or want to work with hardware.

This is for hardware engineers who have 0 money, and they just want to prove that some people want their product.

It's not trying to build a multimillion dollar campaign with super fancy CGI graphics and overproduced videos.

I'm talking about people honestly saying, I just need a little bit of money to get this idea off the ground.

And I think there's an opportunity to use crowdfunding right there.

It can be as simple as just emailing a bunch of your friends and saying, hey, do you want 1 of these?

This is like the best test that you can have for early product market fit is, do your friends and family actually want to pay you money for what you're making?

Or do early customers actually want to prepay for what you're making?

It's not perfect, because they may want to try it first, or something like that.

But if you are making something that people really want, they're basically throwing their money at you.

So that's an opportunity for this early crowdfunding.

I really encourage people to not try to do the marketing blowout campaign at the start for 2 reasons.

Most of those campaigns, even if they do succeed at raising money, usually fail to produce and actually ship their product.

And I think the reason why is going through the cycle of having to make something and ship it to customers is really educational.

And you also learn what people like about your product or what they don't like as quickly as like you reduce the amount of time between you having the idea and you getting validation of do people actually want this idea.

So that's the first I think opportunity for crowdfunding.

I think there's actually another opportunity using it more as like a marketing and sales channel, which is I think more of what we did, where we had already made, most people don't know this, but when we launched our Kickstarter campaign, we had already made and sold around 1,500 of our first watch.

And so we had gone through like all the pain and the cycle of building that.

And we had a really good idea of what Pebble should look like, because we had feedback from about 1,500 individuals who were super eager early adopters, very open with their feedback.

So I think there's kind of like 2 separate crowdfunding opportunities in a consumer products lifecycle.

I think too often people blend them together, or they don't know which path they're on.

There's actually a couple other platforms for this early crowdfunding.

There's, you know, Kickstarter and Indiegogo and that kind of thing.

But there's also Tindie, there's Crowd Supply, there's like Hackaday forums, there's a lot of like really niche areas where you could, you can go to a discord server and say like who wants what like you don't have to use the big Kickstarter platforms for that early phase.

Do you suggest having like a date in which you know I can promise you I can actually deliver this Because if I'm using Kickstarter with the first route, maybe I don't know that I can deliver within 6 months.

Is there a certain time period in which I know I can deliver, then I do that?

And if you're not, I would encourage, if you're not confident in your ability to ship it, then don't use 1 of these like crowdfunding campaign platforms where it's very centric, like shipping centric.

And again, like I really do encourage going through that first cycle to find out things like, how long does it take me to make things?

Do I have all the skills on my team or do I actually have to find people potentially in the community to help contribute software or other skills to the team.

Again, like too many people I see like, they skip that step and they try to go directly to like the high-powered marketing campaign and it's just, it's just such a sad time most of the time.

Because on Kickstarter, those are kind of early adopters.

And I think for your given industry and for your given product category, you should be able to find it.

Like Sometimes it's as simple as going on a subreddit.

We've had some great companies come through YC, and they do their initial sales just by earning credibility in a Facebook group, or they earn credibility in a Reddit group or Discord.

So when you talked about Pebble earlier, you talked about hiring people and outsourcing things.

What's the right call in terms of outsourcing the various components?

So this is a really hard question for hard tech companies, because more often than not, the skill sets that you'll need to build your products are actually quite varied.

You may need a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a computer engineer, some production people, ops people.

And you don't necessarily need 100% of that person all the time.

And then you're back to not needing an electrical engineer.

So The best way to solve this is to have really flexible, technical people on your team, where you guys can just kind of incorporate everything and just do it yourself.

Because those teams move so much faster than teams that require an external kind of process.

Some of the most painful moments of my early career were not having full-time co-founders and having to work with contractors or consultants who, honestly, you can't pay someone enough to care.

I mean, firstly because you probably don't have that much money, but also because people who are working on contract, they're just set up to not have the same motivations and the same alignments that someone who's working 24-7 trying to get their fledgling startup off the ground has.

I just had an email the other day from a founder who's like, yeah, our intern went back to school and He was developing a large portion of our company.

So I actually opt for, in the early days, and pretty much all days, trust and dependability and kind of smartness over very specific, deep, domain-specific knowledge in who I'm looking to hire.

So last question on hardware specifically.

There's this common saying or adage or whatever you wanna call it.

It's like hardware, you can't just build hardware.

You have to have a software component so that it scales and you can have like a subscription service on top of it instead of just the one-off type purchase.

How much do you believe in that or what do you think about People who say that all the time.

So I've been working on, I've been doing a bit of research into this category.

It's really got me interested right after Pebble because that was some feedback that we often got.

Could you have some sort of payment subscription?

And you've heard of product market fit, right?

The idea that customers really, in a particular market, are going after your product.

I actually think there's something called business model company fit, where you could have the best product in the world, you could actually have product market fit.

But if you have the wrong business model, you're not going to be able to fund and grow your company over the long term.

You don't need to worry about this if you don't have product market fit, because if you don't have product market fit, you don't have a company.

But we ran into a problem pretty soon after we hit product market fit of misunderstanding What was the business model that was going to drive this company?

And I think there's actually like 7 or 8 or 9 different business models that are useful, that are kind of like lanes that hardware companies or hard tech companies can use.

I've been working on just kind of researching and putting companies into different categories.

And you have the subscription companies, like the Nests or the Drop Cams of the world that are selling Ring healthy, 3 to $10 subscriptions per month.

But then you see other companies that try to do something similar, and it just does not work.

And I think that's because, so in our case we didn't struggle I think with subscriptions.

But the way that we screwed it up was we didn't understand that we were in a hits-driven market.

Hits-driven being you come up with a consumer product, hopefully it's a hit, it hits that product market fit, and people start pulling it out of your hands.

Similar to a game company, we didn't realize that we had to be super frugal, super kind of low budget as we developed the new products and kind of tried to engineer another hit.

I don't think we ever reached escape velocity to a hit with any of our later products.

And I think if we had built a more frugal organization, if we were able to build products cheaper and then launch them and test to see if they were successful, and if they were successful, scale it up, etc.

I think we might have had a slightly different outcome.

I mean, it kind of goes back to, like, there are these different models for hardware companies.

And you need to make sure that you're on the right 1.

Should we really be on a subscription model?

Is this really what customers are going to want, but they want to spend $5, $10 a month.

And if you force it, like I think we tried to do, you might add extra problems on top of just building great products for your customers.

So we've funded lots of cool hard tech companies lately.

Quantum computing, self-driving cars, 3D printing entire homes, so and so forth.

So maybe we can calibrate the conversation a little bit.

For me, I think what, what I'm excited about, you know, in harder technology spaces, is that is the in the in the software world, the iteration cycles are quite short.

You can push code to your repo and have it go live within seconds.

And so you can rapidly iterate on your product and get feedback from your customers.

They don't have the same rapid iteration cycle.

They either have hardware in the mix, which kind of is not at that same speed yet, though it is dramatically decreasing in the amount of time that each iteration cycle takes.

Or you might have some sort of fundamental technology that you're working on that needs to be developed in order to unlock a new business model or a new use case.

Or you might be regulatory, regulatorily constrained, either in the medical device space, drone space, transportation space, self-driving car space.

These are all like, there's external processes that you can control that affect your iteration cycle time.

So say I have this crazy idea, something to do with rockets or something insane to most people normal to me of course.

And I have no money, what do I even start?

It doesn't cost that much money to get started these days.

You can do something like Startup School, where they give you free money to invest in, like if you're working on AR and machine learning, you can use that to get compute credits.

Well, maybe a better question is what is an MVP?

So for medical devices, I think the MVP is successfully peer-reviewed science that supports what you're working on, that there's some sort of opportunity here, and a kind of understanding of what your path to clearance is.

Those are, in my opinion, I think the best companies because they're the ones who have shown that they understand which business model they're in and they know what's going to be taken of them to get to sales.

But they don't necessarily have to be too far along that path.

I think at that stage investors start to get excited when they see the mating of science in a use case.

We've had a bunch of companies that are working on rockets and satellites and propulsion and that kind of thing.

For those cases, it's usually some sort of subset scale representation of what you're working on and customers.

So in all cases, even if you're working on regulatory constrained products, having customers either contributing money to you through early contracts or for or further along on the kind of pilot track, the better, I think oftentimes engineers, we love to build things.

And so what I look for in early stage companies is are the founders technically competent and do they understand that they're gonna have to kind of perverse themselves to become salespeople or not?

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

A Conversation on Hard Tech with Eric Migicovsky