#049 - RERUN - Elements of building a successful tech business, with (proven) serial entrepreneur Milton Chang of Incubic Venture Fund, USA
Release Date: 02/28/2018
#068 - Challenges of small manufacturers to organise their production and inventory, with Kristjan Vilosius of Katana, Estonia
The Hardware Entrepreneur
This episode’s guest is Kistjan Vilosius of , a startup from Estonia. Working at a small-, medium-sized company, or startup you have to wear many hats and it happens often that there are simply not enough people to wear those hats. You have limited resources. Highly efficient way of working is therefore extremely important. How many times did it happen that you spent unexpectedly high number of hours trying to fix some issues when using your software, for example plain old spreadsheets, especially when those spreadsheets are connected, which handle different aspects of your business? This...
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#067 - How to speed up your New Product Introduction - Production Line Tool, with Pete Staples of Blue Clover Devices, USA
The Hardware Entrepreneur
My podcast guest is Pete Staples, co-founder and president of Blue Clover Devices with locations in San Francisco, Hong Kong and of course, Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of Hardware. This is an episode on some important aspects of production lines and its challenges. Without a production line you have no mass manufacturing so if you want to play in that field, it’s good to know about some current issues. Pete’s company is originally and even now an ODM company. In this episode he will talk about what they do as an ODM. You’ll also find out about typical waste in production lines and what...
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#066 - How to apply lean startup principles to hardware, with Ash Maurya of Leanstack, USA
The Hardware Entrepreneur
I have a very special guest, one of the pioneers of one of the most popular innovation frameworks these days: the lean startup framework. My guest is Ash Maurya, who along with Eric Ries, did some substantial work in this field, laying the foundations of this concept. You’ll learn in this episode why this idea is still important today, especially in hardware field after it was born around the last financial crisis. You’ll get to hear also what companies are using it, some tactics you can use to make it work for you and also how others use it so you can get inspired. Ash will describe some...
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#065 - How to care about sustainability to get rid of plastic bottles (and still make a profit), with Moritz Waldstein of Mitte, Germany
The Hardware Entrepreneur
My guest in this episode is Moritz Waldstein-Wartenberg of from Berlin, Germany. We all drink water, mostly, I guess. I drink it in my tea, usually Fennel Anis Cumin bio tea, I drink it many times per day. Or I consume water in its pure form. But is water really pure? If it’s not pure, for example tap water, which we drink many times in Europe, how do you make sure you have a high quality water at home without going to the supermarket, paying for it and without taking, then throwing out the plastic bottles? And if you get it in the supermarket, is that good enough water for us? Mitte...
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#064 - To transform or not to transform your hardware company to an all agile one next year, with Balint Horvath, Switzerland
The Hardware Entrepreneur
I’m back on this episode and you will hear about the continuation of the topic of the . What should you do once you know you have a problem worth solving and you validated what solution you should build with all the features? Should you just go ahead and develop the product based on the specs, the whole development potentially taking multiple years? What is some framework that’s being adopted by more and more organisations these days, such as by Tesla, Bosch, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Boeing, Saab Defense or also some of the smaller companies, startups? They realized you cannot keep developing...
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#063 - Your (hardware) product is not your product - think in terms of business models, with your host Balint Horvath, Switzerland
The Hardware Entrepreneur
This episode features me and I’ll talk about topics that are especially relevant for technical founders. Your product is not the product. Many of us in high tech entrepreneurship have a technical background, with years of academic training where we’ve been educated about how to build products, with all the technical skills needed for that. We know how to calculate many things, such as mechanical properties, we know how to create CAD drawings, and how to actually translate theory into practise by actually building stuff. But is entrepreneurship really about these technicalities,...
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#062 - How a hardware SaaS company wants to help you not get lost in your data during product development, with Michael Corr of Duro Labs, USA
The Hardware Entrepreneur
I had Michael Corr as guest, who is the co-founder and CEO of from LA, southern California. I already had a guest from LA in , Shaun Arora of , the hardware accelerator. Michael is also in a way supporting the hardware ecosystem, but he’s not from an accelerator. He’s helping hardware companies with their developments and he has a product for it. His product is at the interface between software and hardware. He’s been deep in hardware development, designing and manufacturing all kinds of hardware products for more than 15 years both in the US and outside. Hardware products he has...
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#061 - RERUN - How to avoid mistakes when building a team - lessons from mentoring 1200+ hardware entrepreneurs, with Alan Clayton of SOSV
The Hardware Entrepreneur
This is a rerun episode after one month of no publishing. As mentioned in the last episode, I changed the publishing frequency to monthly. Why am I doing now a re-release of a past episode? Perhaps you’ve seen the recent report by HAX, the hardware accelerator based in Shenzhen, China and in San Francisco: . In the report they mentioned the importance of a great team when building a company and immediately this past episode with Alan Clayton came up in my mind, who’s the person assessing hardware startup teams’ healths. Since this is a very important topic, I wanted to bring it in focus...
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#060 - Future global data connectivity without worrying about your costs, with Guy Zbarsky of Keepgo, Israel
The Hardware Entrepreneur
My guest is Guy Zbarsky, co-founder of Keepgo, a firm that has been in business for about a decade. Guy’s company is called Keepgo and this company name already suggests that they want you to keep going, everywhere you want to go to. Some of you know that well, I cannot live very long without traveling so their topic connected with me. I met their company via one of my trips at IoT Tech Expo in Amsterdam at the end of June this year. Their business operates in a fast-moving field, in telecom. This also means that Guy will share some interesting tips and stories, how they’ve been riding the...
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#059 - Where IoT/AI are heading to - impressions from IoT Tech Expo Europe, with Balint Horvath, Switzerland
The Hardware Entrepreneur
Recently I participated in in Amsterdam on 27-28 June. It was a fascinating event to feel the pulse of the industry, how things stand and where the industry is heading to. In this episode I want to bring you some of the highlights, essential take home messages. This event is one of the biggest ones of its kind in Europe with nearly 9000 attendees. It had a few sections, including AI, IoT, Blockchain. At least half of the exhibitors were related to blockchain. However, in this episode in order to have some focus, I’ll concentrate more on the former two fields. Enjoy this episode! Raw...
info_outlineAgain, this is a rerun episode so a re-release of the episode with Milton Chang of Incubic. You can find out more about some of the reasons for it in the last episode and in the episode before that. This is another episode that is in the top 5 episodes regarding download numbers; in fact it’s #3 on my podcast chart.
Dr. Milton Chang, is a serial entrepreneur with an impressive, long track-record of building hardware companies.
Milton is currently managing partner of Incubic Venture Fund. He was president of Newport and New Focus, which he took public. In addition, the companies he incubated resulted in six IPOs and close to 10 acquisitions. He currently works with several companies, including Aurrion (acquired by Juniper Networks), MBio Diagnostics, YesVideo, and Protein Fluidics. He’s a Trustee of the California Institute of Technology and has recently served on the SEC Advisory Committee on Small and Emerging Companies. He writes a business and management column for Laser Focus World.
Milton is also the author of Toward Entrepreneurship, a book that I consider as one of the best books on entrepreneurship - find out in this episode why.
You can find out in this episode what it means for him to found a company, to grow slowly or fast. You can also learn what you should pay attention to if you come out of academia to start a business, what separates a good from a bad business idea and many many more.
Enjoy.
Raw transcript is available at: https://www.thehardwareentrepreneur.com
Show highlights can be seen below:
- Why I am doing a rerun of this episode - [0:49]
- Toward Entrepreneurship - Milton Chang’s book – [3:48]
- Starting a niche business modestly versus rapidly growing a business in a hot field - [6:48]
- Bootstrapping explained with two examples from his own experience - [8:52]
- What were the critical ingredients that helped Milton start his companies? - [11:51]
- Ingredients that are typically missing in founders who start out right out of school, e.g. after a Master’s or PhD program? - [14:13]
- Self-actualization inside a company - synchronizing the employees’ and the company’s needs [19:02]
- What separates a good business idea from a bad one? - [21:50]
- Pros and cons of different sources for financing a start-up - [23:50]
- Fueling your own dreams - [27:37]
- The field of photonics as an enabler for other industries - [29:18]
- If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [32:48]
- Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [30:07]
- Milton’s morning routine – [34:43]
- Milton’s observations on Asian and European cultural differences – [35:30]
- What is the best way to reach Milton? – [37:10]