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Helping hardware founders build better companies.

I’m excited to announce the second Hardware Workshop, to be held in New York on December 6th and 7th.

The workshop is a two day event for founders of hardware startups to help you learn how to get from an idea to market fit. The curriculum is broken up into a series of 60 minute sessions, taught by experienced hardware startup operators. This workshop goes beyond “how to crowdfund an MVP” to provide lessons applicable in building a successful hardware startup. We hope you leave the workshop with a deeper understanding of what it takes to turn your idea into a successful company.

WHEN?
Friday, December 6th – Saturday, December 7th.

  • Doors open at 9:00am
  • Sessions run every hour (except for lunch) from 10am – 5pm.
  • Followed by Happy Hour

WHERE?
R/GA – 353 W 39th St, New York, NY 

COST?
$100.00

Being entrepreneurs we are sensitive to charging for events, but we found a minimum amount enables us to make the event better (better food, audio/video equipment, location, organizer help, etc), while ensuring you are committed to the event. NYC is more expensive than SF, which is why the event is $100 instead of $50. The dollars go strictly to making the event awesome and the cost includes five meals.

HOW DO I ATTEND?
First you have to apply. We only have 50 open spots. We are looking for founders who are working on a hardware product/project and who really want to attend. We aren’t judging what people are building, just verifying people are actually building hardware. Otherwise the lessons we’re teaching can’t be applied. If your application is accepted you will get an email to purchase a spot.

APPLY HERE

HOW DO I BUY A TICKET?
Once you are accepted you will be emailed a code to purchase your ticket.

TICKET INFORMATION

WHAT WILL I LEARN?
Lots. We will have 12 different 60 minute sections, taught be experienced operators. The topics will cover some of the following:

  • Understanding customer needs
  • Defining your brand
  • Prototyping ugly, early
  • Refining to an MVP
  • Building a team
  • Raising capital
  • Picking the right supplier
  • Made in America
  • Building great software with hardware
  • The right roadmap
  • Creating a platform

WHO IS TEACHING? 

Marc Barros – Contour
Marc Barros is a co-founder and former CEO of Contour, a hands-free camera company that makes action video easy to capture and share. Shortly after graduating from the University of Washington, Marc co-founded Contour in 2004 and led the organization from a garage to a multi-million dollar company with hundreds of thousands of customers around the world. @marcbarros

 

Scott Miller – Dragon Innovation 
Scott N. Miller is the CEO of Dragon Innovation, a company whose mission is to help hardware entrepreneurs succeed in every phase of the journey from a crowdfunding to manufacturing at scale. Prior to founding Dragon, Scott spent 10 years at iRobot and was responsible for setting up and leading the team that manufactured Roomba, Scooba, Looj and ConnectR. Scott is also a General Partner at Bolt, and has served as an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Olin College and taught the Mechanical Design and the Design for Manufacture courses. @dragoninnovate

 

Brett Lovelady – Astro Studios
Brett Lovelady is the co-founder of Astro Studios. Founded in 1994 as a design driven culture to blend creative skills, technologies and lifestyle perspectives into supercharged products and brands. In 2007, to further commercialize their design brand, ASTRO spun-off ASTRO Gaming, a venture backed, hi-performance video gaming products company, which was sold to Skullcandy, Inc. (NASDAQ: SKUL).

 

Amanda Peyton – Grand Street
Amanda Peyton is the co-founder of Grand St., a new marketplace for creative technology. Grand St. highlights independent and design-oriented technology to a worldwide audience of curious buyers. Peyton is an alum of MIT Sloan, Northwestern and Y Combinator and currently lives in New York City.

 

Idan Cohen – Boxee
Idan Cohen, Boxee Co-Founder (Acquired by Samsung). As the co-founder of Boxee, Idan was responsible for the vision and design of Boxee’s critically-acclaimed user experience and market approach merging the simplicity of TV with the richness of the Internet. Prior to Boxee, Idan pioneered the Innovation Lab at Comverse (Fortune 500 company) and developed reconnaissance satellites at the Israeli Aircraft Industries.

 

Ben Einstein – Bolt
Ben Einstein is an experienced product designer and investor. Ben is currently the Managing Director of Bolt, a program built from the ground up to help promising early-stage hardware companies develop their products and get to market. Prior to starting Bolt, Ben ran Brainstream Design, a product design and development consultancy in Massachusetts. Ben has been directly responsible for bringing a long list of products to market covering diverse sectors including consumer electronics, high-performance audio, sporting goods and green energy.

 

Jon Troutman – Canary
Jon is the co-founder and design director of Canary. He formerly led product design at General Assembly creating educational experiences that bridged in-person and online interfaces. He is also a co-founder of Designers Debate Club and previously worked as an art director at DISTINC.

 

Tim Hoover – Canary

Tim is the lead product designer at Canary. He is also a co-author of Kern and Burn: Conversations With Design Entrepreneurs, a co-founder of The People’s Pennant, a MICA GDMFA alumni, and former founding-partner of The Infantree. He was previously at Betaworks and IDEO.

 

Jeff Mancini – R/GA
Jeff is the head of Product Innovation at R/GA. There he oversees a team of strategists bringing brand and business thinking into the innovation process. Prior to R/GA, he served as the global head of brand innovation at Interbrand, the world’s largest brand consultancy. He is an active public speaker and his work with Fortune 500 brands has been widely published. Jeff holds a BA and a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University.

 

Ryan Rzepecki – Social Bicycles
Ryan Rzepecki is the founder and CEO of Social Bicycles. Ryan is an urban planner who specializes in applying mobile technology to improve local transportation. He previously worked for the NYC Department of Transportation as a bike planner before founding Social Bicycles in 2010. His company builds custom bikes with an integrated GPS-enabled locking system that eliminates the need for expensive docking stations. His passion is to advance multi-modal transportation systems by providing the ultimate first/last mile solution.

 

tyler_sqTyler Mincey – Fictive Kin + Apple
I worked at Apple for 5 years managing the engineering development of the iPod product line as well as a few key new technologies like the touch screen for the first iPhone. On the education and mentoring side, I’ve been a teaching assistant and coach for the Smart Product Design Lab at Stanford. These days I work with my good friends at Fictive Kin building new web and mobile products, organizing a conference called Brooklyn Beta, and trying to live a life I’ll be proud to tell the grandkids about.

 

 

Peter Semelhack – Bug Labs
Peter Semmelhack is the Founder and CEO of Bug Labs. Prior to Bug, Semmelhack was Founder and CEO/CTO of Antenna Software, a mobile enterprise software company.

 

 

 

 

Ryan Vinyard – Highway1
Ryan is a Mechanical Engineer who currently works at Lime Lab and Highway1, both PCH International companies. At the Highway1 startup incubator, Ryan helps startups navigate through prototyping and manufacturing processes on the way to production. Previous to joining Lime Lab, Ryan was at Motiv Power Systems working on 100%-electric buses where he was responsible for all mechanical design releases, interfacing with vendors, and installing and maintaining modules on the bus.Ryan holds a B.S. in Product Design from Stanford University.

 

WHO IS PUTTING ON THIS EVENT?

We are a collection of builders who believe that education is the key to success with building hardware startups. Turning hardware ideas into companies is hard and we felt events like this can help make the community stronger.

  • Marc Barros
  • Haytham Elhawary
  • Idan Cohen

 

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS

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Image Credit:Fran Simo via Creative Commons