Ambi Climate and StartWareHK co-founder Julian Lee [far right] provides this guest post that leads to next week’s very first start-up hardware meet-up in Hong Kong.
To get more inspiration for the upcoming first Startware event on 5th March, I have been looking at our neighbour to the North, Shenzhen. The manufacturing mecca for hardware startups, Shenzhen plays host to numerous US based Kickstarter projects, and is also home to the leading hardware incubator, HAXLR8R. With numerous global technology companies doing R&D here, Shenzhen also boasts a large pool of engineers and technicians.
Last weekend, I travelled to Shenzhen to attend the Hack42 hackathon organised by SZDIY. A group of hardware enthusiasts, SZDIY’s members are highly skilled engineers, including staff from HAXLR8R, Nvidia, SUSE, and so on. Although billed as an event for hobbyists, SZDIY’s founders see a clear path towards entrepreneurship.
According to Anders Ma, one of the core members of SZDIY, several hardware startups have already spun off from SZDIY. Indeed, SZDIY members are behind Betwine, one of the recent successes on Demohour, China’s Kickstarter clone. Terry Ouyang, part of the Betwine team told me about the project: “Betwine, is a bluetooth low energy based activity tracking wearable with a mobile app featuring gamification elements, and is the 13th highest supported project on the site”.
“SZDIY and the hackathons we organise are an important way for engineers here to get exposed to the hacker mindset needed to iterate a hardware design.”, commented Roy Mu, another core SZDIY member. “Engineers here are used to working in a large corporate, where their responsibilities are narrowly defined – they are not used to working hand-in-hand in teams to quickly iterate a product design.”
Although similar problems exist in the software world, these have largely been alleviated in startups through modern project management techniques, such as agile, and kanban. However, there is a time criticality element for hardware startups that makes such practices difficult to implement for hardware – before interfaces with their software colleagues can be clearly defined, hardware engineers must first develop the hardware and write the underlying drivers and code. Hackathons, with their tight timeframes (just 42 hours for Hack42) give these engineers a chance to find ways to overcome these challenges and learn to work in parallel with their team mates.
Over the last couple of years, the Hong Kong startup scene has blossomed and matured, thanks largely to the efforts by the StartupsHK organisers. While many HK startups operate either in the eCommerce or mobile app space, as the overall community has grown so has the number of hardware focused startups, such as Makible and Phonejoy (our co-organisers for Startware), as well as close friends [e.g. Haddock Innovation, Decoris, etc] and other familiar names in the community. Indeed, with the recent successes of HK based Kickstarter campaigns [3doodler, Native Union, Muku Labs, etc] celebrated at the recent Startup Saturday: Crowdfunding 2014, we have seen a surge in interest in founding, developing and investing in hardware startups.
Ambi Labs has benefited tremendously from the overall energy and events in the HK startup scene; from pitching events to gain exposure, to networking through organisations to find mentors and advisors. Networking with other startup founders has also allowed us to benefit from the collective wisdom of the group. At the same time, we have experienced a number of challenges and questions that are unique to those those in the hardware space, including management (how do you adapt agile to hardware?), regulatory (what certification do you need for your product?), developmental (access to prototyping resources) and of course, the actual production itself (purchasing, sourcing, manufacturing and shipping).
So what does the Startware community mean to me? In my opinion, a couple of things would help to boost and accelerate the hardware community in Hong Kong:
- Knowledge. A platform to share hardware startup focused know-how and connections, from management, to freelancers, to production resources. A forum for hardware startup founders to discuss their challenges and tap into a shared knowledge base.
- Manpower. A pool of startup savvy engineers and designers, who want to, and know what it means to get involved in a hardware startup. Hardware focused startup weekends would be an excellent way of giving those interested a chance to explore and get a feel for what is involved.
What do YOU want to see in the Startware community? Come join us on March 5th at WYND to discuss with like minded hardware startups!
