What is THE HARDWARE ENTREPRENEUR and what is in it for you?
In this podcast I interview hardware entrepreneurs, who build physical products, to bring you the stories of how they started their companies and how they run them to enable you to start yours.
Why?
Our Earth runs on resources and is based on atoms rather than on bits. Our real progress thus depends mainly on our producing, selling innovative physical products, so hardware products. Hardware is Internet of Things, that is IoT, devices connected to the internet, or 3D printers, drones, robots that are in today’s headlines, and which actually have quite a lot of software running on them. But they can also be any physical product, e.g. a sustainable pencil that is purely hardware with no software element. Hardware is...different, different than software. Challenges are everywhere, in designing, manufacturing, getting funding, hiring, innovating, delivering to the customers.
I found that resources are scattered around on the internet in blogs, discussion forums or in a few recently published books on hardware. I consider the total amount of available resources little especially for this complex hardware field. Where do you get real, practical knowledge? Either by going through building a hardware company or by hearing it first-hand from others, what they have gone through when building their own companies.
I started this podcast exactly for this latter reason, to bring you stories of entrepreneurs of atoms, that is of hardware companies. We will uncover what their motivation was, what challenges they encountered, then overcame them regarding funding, strategies, business models they iterated on and found, as well as tackling some of the aforementioned topics, e.g. manufacturing, innovation, hiring, etc.
Who and where is the host?
I’m Balint Horvath, founder and host of The Hardware Entrepreneur podcast. I'm an entrepreneur and cosmopolitan, originally from Hungary and currently based in the heart of Europe, in Switzerland, where green is green regarding its pastures, mountains and where fresh innovations make the country as one of the top places for innovation.
You might know Switzerland as the place to be for high-quality chocolate, but it is also a place where next to green pastures, mountains, fresh innovations are born out of research labs of large companies, from startups or small-medium-sized companies. This makes this country as one of the top places for innovations, ranking it actually as Nr. 1 in the world for innovativeness.
My background and what drives me
As for my background, I am a physicist and an electrical engineer, with a PhD in the former, an M.Sc. in the latter fields. I have been always fascinated by technology and how things work which led me to a path to explore engineering and physics first in academia, then in the industry, in my last role as scrum master for a hardware startup in the Zurich area (Switzerland). Inventions and ones that can be turned into innovations creating business opportunities are what excite me. Apart from that I'm a new parent and I document my experiences at Projectfather so also others can learn from learnings or mistakes.
If you want to find out more about my journey related to this podcast, I encourage you to listen to the first episode.
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