Building hardware at a startup is an incurable disease, not a career move

I’m writing an answer to a question I often get asked at the end of talks.

Readers who follow my blog already know how many difficulties await when you build physical products at a startup, so I won’t list them out again here.

For that reason, I can’t recommend hardware manufacturing at a startup in most cases.

If you just want a taste of what starting a company feels like, get together with friends in your spare time, build an app, spin up a cloud environment with some AWS credits, and launch a service. If it fails, all you lose is some effort and a trivial amount of money. Given what you gain in experience, it more than pays for itself.

These days, almost every problem in the world can be solved with some combination of smartphones and cloud services.

“But you’re the one who’s always building physical products, aren’t you?”

I can hear that objection coming. True enough. Plenty of problems in the world can’t be solved without something physical, and I’m the type who can’t help being drawn to exactly those kinds of problems.

That’s just my nature.

I think of this as my own “incurable disease.”

A fate you can’t shake off no matter what you do. Something that clings to you no matter how much you try to avoid it. Something that, somewhere in your heart, you’re always comfortably drawn back to.

I used to call it by a different word — “entanglements” — but “incurable disease” fits better.

Depending on the case, it might even be something that could eventually kill you, but it’s a chronic condition I’ve had since birth, so I have no intention of complaining about it now, and no intention of arguing about it with anyone else. That’s the kind of thing it is.

What’s the incurable disease inside you?

If the disease you carry prizes rationality above all else, you almost certainly won’t arrive at the conclusion of building hardware. The options of “having someone else make it” or “using something someone else already made” are available to you.

Some people are afflicted with the disease called “entrepreneurship,” and in that case, what I described above applies.

If the disease inside you is “ambition” or “a hunger for honor,” those symptoms could probably be eased without going through hardware at all.

But if you’re a huge fan of antique guitars, or you love fussing over your camping gear every weekend, or you have a habit of compulsively collecting the latest gadgets, then maybe the disease of making things really is inside you.

What drives people to start companies is, in most cases, “a self-imposed sense of necessity born from a private conviction.”

I know that sounds a bit contradictory, but here’s what I mean: inside the person, there’s a sense that “this has to be done,” a necessity, but it doesn’t necessarily take a form that would convince everyone looking at it from the outside.

I have a friend who’s fixated on the wonderfully dreamy theme of “establishing a true means of communication” (he wants to break open a hole in modern communication). When I push back with “But don’t things like X and Y already exist?”, he launches into a passionate speech about all the shortcomings and inconsistencies of those services and why they need to be fixed. Over coffee, I just nod along and say “yeah, yeah, I see,” but if I were an investor, I think the correct response would be, “Yes, thank you. You may leave now.”

An incurable disease sometimes comes with a pain that feels like it’s crushing your chest, but that too is part of what makes life rich. Please, go find the incurable disease inside you.

And if, at the far end of following it faithfully, “making things” comes into view, I hope the contents of this blog will be there to support you.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/07/538/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.