Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR
blog.zacka.ioFun read but a bit too much fluff? I was a design MechE for about a decade and I’m by no means as successful as the OP. But I have worked on a 5 person design team that had an annual net revenue of 30M and another job where I worked on 25M+ contract with just a team of 2, me and my mentor at the time. End of the day, hardware execution is hard and there’s a ton of product development cycle theories, you just need a culture with what I call good engineering discipline. Good communication, good documentation, and realistic milestones with accountability.
Fluff? It is written by a chatbot.
According to the draft Wikipedia article for this company that hasn't been published because it is not yet considered sufficiently noteworthy, this company has existed for 17 years, built their first production facility in 2023, and first delivered working units into real cars last March. That doesn't strike me as moving all that fast. It also says they acquired the Bose product they're shitting on in this article for doing things wrong.
If it works, it works, but I really wish companies and founders would just be honest about how and why they succeed when they do, instead of everything needing to be the constant projection of a desired image.
Yup this reads like post hoc revisionist marketing content rather than an engineers diary
I think Clearmotion has a very interesting technology and product (ride stabilization), but let's paint a full picture here: the company was founded in 2009, took on $370 million in funding, and only recently landed large contracts (a $1 billion dollar deal in 2023 with Chinese auto manufacturer, Nio).
I'm sure they were in a constant struggle for survival and had to "move fast" to stay afloat, but their technology is more than a decade in the making.
I think the super long timelines in automotive make it really hard to succeed. Really impressed with what ClearMotion accomplished given that
I would venture a guess that there is little interest in adding complexity to the humble shock absorber. A simple passive mechanical system is replaced with a complex servomechanism featuring sensors and actuators which live a hard life under a car.
What is the longevity vs a passive system? How much is it to service vs standard suspension? How much does this change the overall suspension design? How much weight does it add? I bet the answers to those questions since 2009 were not at all enticing to automotive designers or bean counters.
Personally, I would not want such a system on my car. It sounds like another expensive maintenance item you have to deal with that adds little or no value.
And it is extremely likely Nio made that deal to see whether they could embrace, extend, extinguish them.
Outsource the mature, insource the uncertain is very true. A lot of startups outsource precisely the part of the system they understand least, but that is oftentimes the worst possible decision.
Nice read but falls into a vast reductionist trap, a lot of survivorship bias dressed up as design philosophy or strategic bets. The context of decisions made decades ago != now, people were working under different constraints etc. Trying to frame the avionics example as the "subtractive" innovation is the most egregious, transistors were over 1000x times smaller, weight wasn't even a consideration.
> a lot of survivorship bias dressed up as design philosophy or strategic bets
I wish more people realized this
I'm mostly curious how much of that revenue is actual ARR, which is to say contractually recurring. It is pretty dang rare for a hardware company to have nontrivial ARR.
automotive contracts are typically on 6 year cycles, so tech gets designed into a new car and it's locked in until the next vehicle generation (5-7 years depending on the automaker). year to year sales can fluctuate but are fairly predictable.
Just when I think I cannot see more emdashes, there are more emdashes.
As a human emdash enjoyer, I'm pretty damn grumpy that everyone assumes I'm a chatbot now. :P
Optimizing for learning/iteration speed is a solid approach that applies just as much to software development.
Could anyone recommend the same for a software startup? (Lessons learned, mistakes to avoid etc)
Can someone in plain English please tell us what this company does? I just see one anecdote after another that’s scattered with feel-good whodathunkit babble. I was anticipating the airplane holes analogy, but maybe I got lucky and missed it.
"ClearMotion, a company developing automotive robotics that stabilize vehicle ride and handling"
At what point does active suspension become robotics? Because there are a lot of automakers who should be repositioning to get their multiples up.
eh! Marketing is a thing.
That said, I do remember once introducing a new engineer to our project and I demonstrated how on closing the door, the machine ingested samples. When the ram started to move, his response was "Oh, Danger Will Robinson! I always wanted to work on a robot" Til then I hadn't thought of our instrument as a robot, but I guess by a loose definition, any "intelligent" electromechanical assembly could be...
Thank you!
Depends on how much funding you have, your target audience, target vertical, and how custom your hardware is, no? There can only be so many things you can cut and optimize.
The signature of claude is in the piece. “Same X, Same Y, Z later”.
Great piece but sometimes I wonder how much is human thought vs AI fluff.