Originally published on Medium

3Scan hardware Don’t. Your not up to it. Its a bad idea and a worse investment. You will watch your peers in every other business grow, develop, flourish or crash several times in what you consider a revision cycle. You will sacrifice the best years of your life reading thousands of pages of documentation which will at best mislead you, and at worst lead to fires. No, not the bullshit “fighting fires” that people use to describe their day at work.

Literal. Uncontrolled. Flames.

Not dissuaded yet? Sorry to hear that. Your poor choices will become clear to you before too long.

Lets say your scrape and beg together the hardware you need to make a demo of your company. Good work. Now you have to jump all the hurdles of starting a software company. Woooo, lucky you!

Alright, lets get a little more tangible with some experiences drawn from my time at 3Scan.

In the first three months, we spent approximately $100,000 on six parts. Every single one had multi-month lead times, no return policy, zero resale value, and were catastrophically fragile. Damaging any single one of them would have probably sunk our company.

To form our core business offering, the most fragile part needed to be positioned approximately a millimeter from the part most likely to cause it damage. From there our task was to continuously ram the most expensive part, a nanometer precise motor system, against the cheapest one, a monlithic wedge of diamond, missing catastrophic collisions by the thickness of half human hair. We had to perform the above miracle about 30,000 times before anyone took anything we did seriously.

For perspective, if we had instead built a robot to play golf, it could have used a club fashioned out of 2 kilograms of 24k gold, and “success” would have required it to play enough rounds to have seen a hole-in-one…three times…while using a single golf-tee made of glass.

What. The. Fuck.

Still reading? Don’t. If my discouragement isn’t enough just ask someone else to pay for for your new-found hardware habit. The bad news is that they almost certainly have better judgement than you. Hah!

To get that hardware startup feeling, simply walk into a pitch meeting and calmly explain that the first step toward success is setting a $100,000 aflame to appease Níðhöggr, the god of chaos, so software development can commence.

The average VC will say something veiled, like “I don’t see the capital efficiency of this endeavor,” when they actually are trying to remind you, that for the same money, you could dispense $100 bills in place of toilet paper, and tell your engineers to write a traditional rails app and forgo the cash sacrifice.

Here is how VC’s think about your hardware company:

(Things I Don’t Understand) + Software Company = Hardware Company

Which informs how you should think about your hardware company:

(Things I might understand) + Software Company = Hardware Company

Alright. You made it this far, indicating you can ignore honestly tendered good advice. You might be cut out for this industry. Lets talk about your adversaries, as they are numerous and more powerful than you:

  • Vendors — They will lie. They will take your money. They will over promise, and under deliver…late. They will astound you with the ability to present the utmost confidence that widget-X will solve your problems, then when you buy one, seem surprised that widget-X might even be used in problem solving. Fuck those people.
  • Support Engineers — Mothers don’t let your children grow up to be support engineers. “Support” is a word we prefix to engineer in the same way we prefix “Witch” to doctor, it is an explicit indication of the inability of the person to actually participate in the discipline. The single great support engineer I ever worked with was fired for “Not fitting in.” Irony. I can’t be angry at support engineers, I just wish they weren’t the ones answering the phones when I had a problem.
  • Bull$hit companies — Did you know Magic Leap raised 2 billion dollars? You recruit against these companies. I know a engineer there that hasn’t even seen the hardware they develop software against. Who cares! I mean, I would go work for them too if they offered twice the cash I was making now…wait. Fuck.
  • Real Companies — During the early days of my startup, I would go interview at “real” companies (FAANG) because eating the lunch there was a welcome relief to the hole-in-the-wall off 6th street I frequented. The recruiter at YouTube eventually caught on after seeing me on the opposite side of the table at a recruiting event. Whoops. These people also offer twice what you can, and also a nice-warm blanket of “were going to exist next year” that no amount of minced words can really hide.

Google L3 salary

All that said, you might get lucky. 3Scan was 8 of the most fulfilling years of my life. We were lucky, and frankly, you probably won’t be…