What he looks for in hardware founders

in five or ten years and we'll buy it. So you have to be able to close a a business case now to a certain extent. And there is you you can say, look, for the first X number of like units or years, this is essentially gonna be venture funded. And you're it's gonna be at a loss. per product, that's not great, but it's, you know, doable if you can if you can show that curve being steep enough within reason. Like,

Mm.

if that makes sense.

by the way, maybe I can I can take the opportunity now To let the two founders I have that they would like to pose your their questions and have a conversation with you if that's fine with you Okay, so

Okay, hello.

guys, great to see you!

Hi J.

Yes.

Yeah, nice to meet you. so we're we're in the next summer batch at YC. We're working on hardware. specifically

Cool.

we're building like a system to clear fog over solar farms. yeah, it was a great speech by the way, like about like Blake Shaw and like the SpaceX stuff. It was like really nice. I think as an investor and like all that experience in hardware, when you meet founders, what what do you look for? what are the biggest signals that what they work on might work or that company is actually that can like it can actually become big?

Yeah. I well so like hardware in specifically is interesting in this regard. There's a lot of similarities to the software world. but traction is different in hardware, like because of the inherent time in required. So what I like to look for is in their past, have they done something impressive and they have they done something fast? and then A big part of it is like one of my founders and I were talking about this yesterday. His term for it, not mine, but do they have that dog in Because like

Well that's good.

whether you're in software or hardware, like founder is a grind, right? Like can you go pound and YC will hammer you guys on this? Can you go pound on like a hundred customers' doors a week or whatever it is?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

and you like get told no or this is dumb like over and over. can you do that with investors? Like the reality is with an investor, I mean you guys are gonna be in a very unique position at demo day that is you know. Maybe this advice is like not helpful in that regard because you're by definition gonna have a ton of investors looking at you that are high quality and you already have a high quality signal, but like if you're not at YC or you're raising follow-on rounds, like being able to pound on a a ton of investors' doors. this guy just closed a a very large seed round for how early they are and he talked to four hundred investors. he's that's got your dog in you,