Hardware Workshop - Seattle, 2014

Seattle

Hardware workshop is a two day event for hardware startups. Taught by experienced operators, it’s purpose is simple: Teach important lessons to the next generation of hardware entrepreneurs.

What makes this workshop unique is the quality of the content, the deep operational experience of the teachers, and the long term connections you will make. Hand curated, each teacher covers a unique topic that falls within the startup’s life cycle from an idea to reaching market fit.

WHEN?
Friday, March 14th – Saturday, March 15th

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

WHERE?
Synapse Product Development – 1511 6th Ave, 3rd Floor, Seattle, WA 98101

COST?
$75.00

This includes two breakfasts, two lunches, beverages, and happy hour.

Being entrepreneurs we are sensitive to charging for events, but we found a minimum amount enables us to make the events better (good food, audio/video equipment, location, organizer help, etc), while ensuring you are committed to the event.

HOW DO I ATTEND?
Applications are now closed. We have filled the 75 available spots.

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

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:

Refining to an MVP
Defining your brand
Prototyping early and often
Creating a quality process
Making design part of your DNA
Building a team
Raising capital
Picking the right supplier
Being retail ready
Winning the category
Succeeding at crowdfunding

WHO IS TEACHING?

	Marc Barros – Moment Marc Barros is a co-founder of Moment, amazing lenses for your mobile phone. Before Moment, Marc was 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
	Kyle Hart – Rhino Camera Gear Kyle Hart is the founder and CEO of the Puget Sound start-up, Rhino Camera Gear. Established less than three years ago in Kyle’s garage, their small team has raised almost $500K from crowd-sourcing platforms to bootstrap their way into the highly competitive camera gear industry. Rhino’s passion is for quality film making accessories that make compelling and cinematic video available to anyone from the amateur to the seasoned Hollywood professional.
	Becky Brown – FiftyThree Becky Brown is the Art Director for brand at FiftyThree, Inc., – maker of the award winning iPad app Paper, and the new stylus Pencil. Becky’s focus is the creation of meaningful connections between hardware and brand. Before joining FiftyThree, Becky worked on design language for Courier and Xbox products at Microsoft, and served as Art Director at LUNAR in California.
	Dan Shapiro – Robot Turtles Dan Shapiro is the CEO and primary turtle wrangler at Robot Turtles, LLC, a company created when he accidentally launched the bestselling boardgame in Kickstarter history. Dan spent the last two years leading a Google subsidiary that operates comparison shopping products, which was a result of Google buying his company Sparkbuy. Shapiro blogs at danshapiro.com and tweets as @danshapiro.
	Eric Klein – Lemnos Labs My passion is imagining, engineering, and marketing innovative hardware products. I’ve had the opportunity to found successful startups, manage teams in highly successful, multi-national corporations, and provide capital to early stage startups. I’m a Partner at Lemnos Labs, the San Francisco based hardware accelerator helping lead the worldwide hardware renaissance. I’ve previously enjoyed product roles at Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Real Networks, Palm, and Apple.
	Jim Bob – Zumiez Jim Bob Hume is the Chief Merchant for Zumiez – A chain of 580 retail stores focused on youth culture. Jim Bob has been with Zumiez for almost 20 years, starting in the stores and working his way up through the buying department.
	Stanley Hainsworth – Tether Before founding the creative juggernaut known as Tether, Stanley was VP Global Creative of Starbucks where he oversaw all creative aspects of the brand – from new products, packaging systems and seasonal promotions to brand campaigns and advertising. Stanley also spent twelve years at Nike as a Creative Director working on everything from product launches to the Olympics. After Nike, he moved to Denmark to join the Lego Company as their Global Creative Director where he directed a total visual overhaul of the brand from top to bottom, including packaging, the web, retail and brand stores.
	Kara Wedmore – EVO Kara Wedmore is the current Apparel and Footwear (women’s) buyer at evo. evo is a Seattle based retailer specializing in outfitting outdoor and action sports enthusiasts. Before evo Kara worked as a buyer for Zumiez, another Washington based retailer. Kara has an uncanny eye for current trends and building new and upcoming brands.
	Adam Craft – Dragon Innovation Adam is VP of Manufacturing Engineering and Project Management for Dragon Innovation, a company whose mission is to help hardware entrepreneurs succeed in every phase of the journey from crowdfunding to manufacturing at scale. Formerly VP of Global Product Engineering for Hasbro, he has been leading technical teams and developing global products for over 25 years for companies including Hasbro, iRobot, Water Pik, and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Adam holds engineering degrees from Cornell University and the University of Michigan. A former oarsman, runner, and Ironman, Adam now seeks new pursuits of the knee-friendly variety.
	Bryan Papé – MiiR Bryan Papé is the CEO and Founder of MiiR, an outdoor philanthropic brand that makes amazing products that change the world. Bryan jumpstarted his career in the outdoor industry as the first employee and minority owner of Little Hotties Warmers which sold to Implus in 2009. Soon after MiiR was birthed out of a desire to build a better water bottle and give clean drinking water to those in need.
	Sean McBeath – Igor Institute Sean is a co-founder and mechanical engineer at Igor Institute, a Seattle-based hardware engineering group that focuses on working with inventors, researchers, small companies, and startups. Before founding Igor, he worked as a design engineer at Chef’n and as a mechanical engineer at Synapse Product Development.
	Bret Richmond – Synapse During his time at Synapse, Bret has worked as a mechanical engineer, a project manager, and a mechanical engineering lead on projects like the Philips AirFloss, the Viableware RAIL, and a number of small, highly integrated consumer electronics. In his current role as Director of Engineering, Bret is responsible for ensuring that his multi-discipline teams are delivering high-quality product development consulting to meet their client’s needs.
	Ian MacDuff – FiftyThree Wrangler of electrons, weaver of firmware, and herder of cross-functional teams. Ian has spent his career developing consumer electronics and medical devices from inertial navigation systems and touchscreen remotes to drug delivery robots and defibrillators. He’s currently helping the world capture their creative ideas by putting Pencil to Paper.
	Gary Rayner – Lifeproof A serial entrepreneur, he has founded lead and grown two successful hardware ventures; DriveCam and LifeProof. Gary has a long track record of innovation, pioneering, and driving many consumer products to market. The sum of his ventures have resulted in a generated accumulation of more than 2,000 man years of employment, and approximately $1Bn of revenues.
	Erik Hedberg – Moment Seattle-based designer / powder surfing enthusiast. Working on @Moment. Instagram \| LinkedIn
	Cameron Charles – Synapse Cameron graduated with a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2001, a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah in 2003, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington in 2006. Upon graduation Cameron returned to the University of Utah to work as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department where he taught, supervised graduate students, and conducted research in the areas of analog and radio frequency integrated circuit design. Cameron is currently working as an Electrical Engineer at Synapse, designing embedded systems. Cameron has published his research in numerous journals and conferences, including the 12th most cited paper in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits from the 2000-2009 decade.
	Joe Heitzeberg – Poppy Joe is a co-creator of Poppy, a device that turns the iPhone into a 3D camera, which debuted on Kickstarter and is now in wide availability. Already, thousands of people have captured and shared their lives in 3D using Poppy. Prior to Poppy, Joe spent the last 15 years creating both venture-backed and bootstrapped software companies.
	Scott Jacobson – Madrona Scott joined Madrona in 2007 and currently serves on the boards of Haiku Deck, Indochino, LUMO BodyTech, Mobilewalla, RewardLoop and Yieldex; he is also a board observer for Animoto, BuddyTV, Mercent, Placed, Redfin and ShopIgniter. Prior to joining Madrona, Scott worked at Amazon.com, where he held senior product and business management positions in the Amazon Kindle and Amazon Marketplace groups. Scott is particularly interested in consumer web, digital media, e-commerce, mobile technologies, and hardware. @scottjacobson
	Rob Bangerter – Independent Rob Bangerter is an Operations Professional with extensive experience in Consumer Products. Rob has been involved in all aspects operations from NPI to Reverse Logistics. He has worked in a wide variety of product categories and for industry leading brands such as Ride Snowboards, Gargoyle Eyewear, Cranium Games and Discovery Bay Games. In 2010, while at Discovery Bay Games, Rob was part of small team that created the world’s first, game based App-Enabled accessory for the iPad. Over the next 3 years, the team went on to create eight more products in the mobile space.Since leaving DBG in early 2013, Rob has helped several companies, as a consultant, bring connected hardware to markets around the world. LinkedIN
	Jason Stoffer – Maveron Jason joined Maveron in 2007 and is now a partner focused on investing in hardware, education, e-commerce and web-enabled consumer businesses. He is involved with the firm’s investments in zulily, General Assembly, Julep, Everlane, Koru, Lively and Red Tricycle. Prior to joining Maveron, Jason served as senior director of strategic operations for Career Education Corp., where he co-founded and led admissions and marketing for IADT Online, a for-profit design school. He has also served as an associate at Spinnaker Ventures, an expansion-stage venture capital fund. Jason graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in economics from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!), and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Jason resides in Seattle with his wife Amanda and two boys Eli and Ari.