Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is because of any inherent difference between hardware and software. Sure, the requirement to physically build something adds a bit of a delay, but computer simulation is so good these days that the actual building bit is pretty infrequent. Plus, turnaround time is usually pretty short - two weeks lead was pretty standard for the shops I've worked with and at.

No, the problem IMO is that frankly, our software is shit. The end users of, for example, Solidworks, aren't the people paying for the software, so there's no direct market feedback. Mechanical design software was some of the earliest software ever written, and it's been some of the slowest to change. The hiccups are negotiable if you're working serially and alone, but the second you want to do parallel development on something, or to collaborate with anyone else, you're stuck throwing workaround after workaround on an already slow process. And then there's the catastrophic state of CAM software, BOM integration, inventory management, keeping the books on all that... everything is its own walled system, nothing talks to anything else, and everything sucks. I've spent literally days before duplicating information between Arena and Solidworks drawings -- and they even actually have an integration.

I'm wholly convinced hardware unicorns are so rare because the toolchain we use to build hardware is so bad. It stays bad for historical and short-sighted economic reasons. That is to say, the whole situation is ripe for change. And it's not hard to do, either: I coded up 85% of an MVP for a solid model merge tool that would make solidworks files more or less git compatible in just a month or two. If you want to play with that, it's a hacked-up VBA macro called smgimport/smgexport available here: https://github.com/Badg/SolidworksUtils. I have a lot of thoughts on how to do this right. If you're working in this space and want advice, I'm happy to help.

This isn't my experience. Companies producing hardware or devices tend to think hardware-first. Any firmware or software that needs to be developed is often over-trivialised. The way management sees it is that driver/firmware development eats into profits, so it needs to be done quickly. "It's just software". I'd like to hear what stories other people have.

During the early computer era, the most difficult and expensive problems to solve were in hardware. The profits flowed there.

In recent years, compute was cheap compared to the value provided by quality software - and the software could run on a variety of hardware systems. So software captured most of the value.

There are some new problems that are difficult and expensive to solve that must be solved in hardware. This is making investment and profits flow back to hardware makers. Furthermore the years of commoditization of hardware resulted in consolidation and survival-mode until there were only a handful of serious players in various layers of the manufacturing stack. This will get resolved but will take a long time (decades).

AI businesses constantly need to improve and retrain models. This is extremely compute intensive and time consuming. Therefore we need hardware that is optimized to this specific type of number crunching. This hardware is novel and needs smart and talented people (therefore investment).

As an investor (both of capital and of your labor) you need to analyze where the expensive problems are, with the highest need to be solved, with those that need it most having the highest ability to pay. If you optimize on that spectrum your investment has a better chance of success.

Computer people are drawn to nostalgia, especially considering the entire history of our craft has been meticulously recorded by enthusiasts. We get drawn to certain types of problems and environments and every 10 years the entire world changes. Our profession is one of constant disruption and change.

What makes me rest easy is that the fundamentals have remained constant since the earliest theoreticians. We must use the best algorithms to reduce compute as much as possible. If you do that you win, at the most fundamental level. It’s another way of saying that you must solve the problem as simply as possible (and no simpler).

As an addendum, I don’t fault any talented and ambitious person who goes into the industry where they can make the most money as fast as possible. Some people lament that the best and brightest don’t go into, say, NASA or public school teaching or some such sacrificial act. The bursting of the tech bubble in 2022 and the drying up of VC capital to dime-a-dozen nonsense startups will help drive talented people back to hard problems.

  I hear the phrase “hardware is hard” dozens of times a week. 
  Repeating this cliche misses both the point and the opportunity. 
  If we want to live in a world of autonomous cars, consumer space travel, 
  and a green energy grid (I know I do) we have to stop defining hardware 
  by its difficulties. The truth is, it has never been easier to start a 
  hardware company. Why is this phrase so common?

So in that vein, "hardware is hard"(er) because what counts as "minimally viable" is a more strict and higher bar than what people have been incentivized to create with software.

Or at least that's the impression I get from people when I hear them say, "hardware is hard".

So what is it? Hard or not?

I'm sure you didn't intend to put down software development as being less complex or less difficult than hardware. The challenges are different and it's true that people from one field tend to underestimate the issues of the other.

Are you concerned that at some point it will be possible for people to buy a tiny but fully fledged computer and let software developers create gadgets that do their job but are not real hardware ? Does this mean that people will appreciate less the real work behind creating the actual device that makes it possible?

The advent of complete operating systems make it possible for people to easily create, debug and test programs without sweating. Certainly lowering the bar made it possible for more incompetent people to produce lower quality products.

Working in the layer that enables other people to build on a solid foundation and create stuff more easily without having to reinvent the wheel every time is more difficult but rewarding, and it's easily seen by people in each field as the "true $field".

So it's not software vs hardware, it's about hard vs soft problems, core vs peripheral issues, enabling vs business logic.

So what kind of startup can facilitate that change?

As soon as you need to instantiate something with atoms, the cycle-times and overall difficulty increases exponentially. Just when you think you've got something, all these despicable gatekeepers shove their hands in your pockets.

There are lots of reasons we can't have small batch, niche electronic products, and these license fees combined with even worse regulatory costs require enormous sales volumes to amortize.

It's really concerning to see the same rent-seeking values making such strong headway in the software space over the past 5-10 years too.

Why? Because hardware is hard. I may be an engineer, but scaling production of a hardware unit from a prototype to shippable products en masse is an extremely hard challenge if you're trying to source your hardware from somewhere like China. Its harder if you're not Apple or HP..or Sony for that matter. I think its unfair to judge wakemate to Sony or Apple standards.

Coincidentally, I met the Wakemate guys when I crashed at the SF hacker house during that time. While they're brilliant and dextrous folks, I certainly felt the vibe that they were finding it extremely challenging to design, produce and ship this thing. The idea of wakemate sounded great, but I wasn't convinced that being non-tech founders, they were entirely aware of the technical and logistical challenges of producing and scaling a hardware unit from scratch to the production line.

I wish them luck though. While they could learn a lesson or two about PR, they've been at it for over an year and have persisted. Customer patience may be running thin after these series of setbacks, but I still believe that they will eventually pull it off.

I like the quote, "he says he's not sure why competitor products are so expensive"

Most real hardware companies that I recall failed for reasons other than hardware. Which fits with the author's overarching argument.

When people imagine a hardware company failing, I think most imagine something going terribly wrong with prototypes, some failure in the field, manufacturing failures, overbuying, etc, etc. But I think those events are rarely fatal for real hardware companies.

I say "real hardware companies" because those kinds of failures are endemic with crowd funded hardware startups. And I think that's why most people assume that all hardware companies fail for those reasons, because crowd funded hardware startups get so much public attention.

But outside of the crowd funding bubble, my experience has been that those kinds of events are just normal bumps in the road. We were on razor thin angel funding, and we hurdled all those kinds of problems. What really kills hardware startups is what kills _any_ startup. Bad product-market fit.

Over the decade of my involvement with my previous hardware startup, we watched _tons_ of fellow hardware startups die. Not because they hit some manufacturing snag, or shipped a million units of explosive doorstops. Every single one died because no one wanted their product. The classic startup tale.

Perhaps I have a unique perspective on the whole software startup versus hardware startup thing because I'm a jack of all trades. I'm just as comfortable working software as I am hardware (and boy does that duality come in handy). So I've seen both sides from the trenches. Hardware people will tell you it's harder, because they don't know how frustrating real software development is and assume it's some kind of greener pasture. And software people will tell you it's harder, because hardware is a mystery to them.

I've wasted days dealing with Google Cloud's SDK issues. And I've wasted just as many days chasing a defect in a board remotely with a customer half way around the world.

In other words: The grass is not greener on the software side.

My first job was at an HW startup and I launched a dozen hardware products. It's tough. A screw-up at a single soldering station in Shenzen can screw-up a deal years in the making with Walmart. Overordering materials means you have to lay off friends.

But saying "Hardware is Hard" is an oversimplification.

When we say that to explain the failure of HW startups, we miss a lot of important nuances. Hardware is hard, but that's not the primary reason most HW startups fail. Almost all of the high-profile failures we see in hardware are companies that are trying to be the "Apple of X."

In this post, there are two hardware startups, valued at nine-figures, that are essentially bootstrapped. Hardware was hard for them too, but they managed to win with very little in the way of resources.

Building a successful hardware business is much more difficult than building a successful software business (and thus more risk and less glamour). You have all the same problems in terms of solving a problem, finding a market, and getting traction but you have the additional problems of manufacturing, shipping and retail logistics. Those are probably more challenging to solve profitably than the shared problems.

P.S. Mad props for the companies in Asia that so reliably manufacture the computers that we use every day.

Hit me up if I can help. I've brought a half-dozen devices to market; right now I'm bringing a modular data logger to production and blogging about it at https://blog.supermechanical.com

hardware also fails in the field in unpredictable ways. Especially to anyone without long practical experience.