I am lucky enough to be one of 413 students in the 2014 MBA Class at MIT Sloan. I remember coming to visit prior to making my final selection, and being blown away by the entrepreneurial community here.
It is very evident, that entrepreneurship is not just an offering at Sloan - it is engrained in its culture. It’s as much a part of Sloan, as eating delicious food is to me. I was so pumped to come to this school and get started.
When I arrived, I knew I made the right decision, there were so many offerings for courses, talks, events and team formation that I finally believed, for the first time in my life, that I truly could start a company and have it succeed. Something that had felt like a fairytale - was now within reach.
Then I hit a roadblock. No, roadblocks are common. I met a 20 lb. sledgehammer. I learned a hard and fast truth – people are scared of hardware startups.
Startups are hard enough, and the barrier to entry for software products is so minimal, and the cycle so fast, that ideas can form and fail in very rapid succession with minimal capital investment. This is not true with hardware, where development requires long churn, lab equipment and investment for usually (expensive) components. While things like the Arduino, have made hardware prototyping a lot easier, we’re a long way to comparing with the speed of a software startup.
Software is so blazingly fast, and can blow up so quickly (look at instagram); but if we don’t continue to build awesome hardware, then the system will fall apart. Good software needs hardware, and good hardware needs software!! Take a look at Raspberry Pi, a $25 dollar linux computer. Imagine the amazing products that will come out of this! Already people are using it to create amazing smart tv’s, music and media servers, computers for cars to analyze performance. Think of a possibilities for a $25 dollar computer, then buy a raspberry pi and make it happen. One incredible startup is using it to analyze temperatures in a home to optimize home comfort! (hint hint!)
So, what does the hardware entrepreneur do? I’ll tell you what, because I am one, PROVE EVERYONE WRONG. When I started here at Sloan, people thought we were crazy to pursue our idea. Two months later, when we had a real prototype people took notice.
This means, that while it’s much harder to get started as a hardware entrepreneur – one you do get started you get noticed. People don’t go to the zoo to look at the deer or antelopes. Yes, those animals are cool and awesome to look at – but the Cheetahs or Pandas are what draw people in.