One Hardware Thing

Please, leave comments on this post!

If you had a group of 20 or so intelligent, inquisitive people - but none of them have any experience with hardware writ large - what is the one lesson/exercise that you would run them through? Assume a 90 minute session.

My thoughts: 

• Fix a flat on a bike
• Just tighten/loosen screws/nuts
• Overview of metric vs. English standards
• Overview of hardness vs. tensile/compressive/shear strength
• Basic solid modeling tutorial in Fusion 360
• Basic mechanical feature overview (lever, gear, screw, etc.)
• Industrial vs. Mechanical vs. Embedded design
• Analog & digital circuits

What are your thoughts? 

Photo

Via Hotwheels.

A game played by robots

Ben Thompson, writing about Dropbox:

Business is not a game played by robots; it’s about real people building products that they believe in

"Quick, Big Wins."

According to his LinkedIn page, Piet Morgan began working on Hammerhead in September 2012. Hammerhead went on to raise $190K on Dragon in October of 2013. Immediately afterwards, they entered the R/GA+Techstars accelerator, where they received a $20K stipend + (I'm guessing here - it's a safe bet) an additional $100K convertible note.

Hammerhead matriculated from R/GA in March, and today TomorrowLab announced that they've been hired by Hammerhead to "get to market by September 2014."

They also have Brad Feld and Scott Miller as advisors - two consummate hardware startup experts.

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Things take time. Developing products is hard. Sure: money, guidance, and a space to work in help. But product development is still time consuming, and quick, big wins don't come easily.

As a cyclist, I must say that I'm not particularly interested in Hammerhead; it's just not my style. But I saw their pitch in person at a meetup a few months back, and I must say that it was very good. Piet seems really smart, and the team appears to be down-to-earth and rather personable. We've got friends in common, and from everything I know about their team it seems like they're kicking ass.

But launching things is hard, and quick, big wins are elusive. Remember this, and don't trick yourself into thinking you're above it.

Personal OKRs

First: You should know what OKRs are. I'm not saying there the end-all be-all, but they're totally a thing.

Yesterday I updated my personal goals in the format of OKRs and habits. Here they are.

Objective 1:

Be smarter than I really am.

I use this as a euphemism for formidability & staying on top of shit.

Key Results:

• I’m more organized, and hence more at ease.

• My output results in more inbound traffic.

• My relationships are strengthened through my reliability and ability to communicate effectively.

Habits:

1. Keep a daily checklist & maintain a high “done” rate.
2. Pitch something unironically on a weekly basis.
3. Ship my newsletter weekly.
4. Post 250 words publicly on a weekly basis.
5. Post 750 words publicly on a monthly basis.

Objective 2:

Broaden and deepen my perspective and skillset.

Key Results:

1. A full stack of maker skills.
2. A continually broadening knowledge base.
3. A continuous stream of completed & documented projects.

Habits:

• Lunch/coffee/drinks with someone outside of my immediate sphere on a weekly basis.

• Show continued progress on extracurricular projects on a monthly basis.

• A half-hour of terminal time on a weekly basis.

• One unstructured weekday on a monthly basis.

These will change over time - perhaps sooner than later - but I feel good about them. Wish me luck.

When the Leadership can fail

Astro Teller, talking about the culture of failure at Google X:

When the leadership can fail in full view, "then it gives everyone permission to be more like that."

Cultures that allow for failure at the top are (in my experience) extremely rare. Success and age breed risk adversity (cf. this excellent post by Felix Salmon), and leadership positions tend to be filled by successful people. 

Willingness to fail is also, in my mind, the single most important factor to long term success. Failure offers lessons which are more learnable - and more causal - than success does. In the absence of failure, one's ability to learn is highly compromised.

To me, willingness to fail should be a top priority to everyone. Discussions of risk should be between all parts of an organization. A company's policy on risk & failure should be explicit, and its implications should be clear to all employees and stakeholders.

Not 10 times as hard

From TechCrunch's excellent article about Google X:

No idea should be incremental. This sounds terribly clichéd, DeVaul admits; the Silicon Valley refrain of "taking huge risks" is getting hackneyed and hollow. But the rejection of incrementalism, he says, is not because he and his colleagues believe it's pointless for ideological reasons. They believe it for practical reasons. "It's so hard to do almost anything in this world," he says. "Getting out of bed in the morning can be hard for me. But attacking a problem that is twice as big or 10 times as big is not twice or 10 times as hard."

You Can't Complain

Tamara Mendelsohn, talking with TechCrunch about how the culture of Eventbrite operates:

"You can’t complain here,” Tamara explained. “If you see something wrong, you must fix it."

This is how things should work.

Old models

These are robot door parts I designed in 2012. And I gotta say, this (the black rod in the middle of the photos) was a dumb but kinda clever solution to a shitty problem.

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Departure from the default

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Emphasis mine:

People expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction. This has been verified in the context of gambling: people expect to be happier to gamble and win than if they refrain from gambling and get the same amount. The asymmetry is at least as strong for losses, and it applies to blame as well as to regret. The key is not the difference between commission and omission but the distinction between default options and actions that deviate from the default. When you deviate from the default, you can easily imagine the norm - and if the default is associated with bad consequences, the discrepancy between the two can be the source of painful emotions. The default option when you own a stock is not to sell it, but the default option when you meet your colleague in the morning is to greet him. Selling a stock and failing to greet your coworker are both departures from the default option and natural candidates for regret or blame.

In a compelling demonstration of the power of default options, participants played a computer simulation of blackjack. Some players were asked "Do you wish to hit?" while others were asked "Do you wish to stand?" Regardless of the question, saying yes was associated with much more regret than saying no if the outcome was bad! The question evidently suggests a default response, which is, "I don't have a strong wish to do it." It is the departure from the default that produces regret.

The Wrong Idea

Lou Lenzi, GE General Manager of Industrial Design, talking with The Atlantic about outsourcing: 

“What we had wrong was the idea that anybody can screw together a dishwasher,” says Lenzi. “We thought, ‘We’ll do the engineering, we’ll do the marketing, and the manufacturing becomes a black box.’ But there is an inherent understanding that moves out when you move the manufacturing out. And you never get it back.”

Take note of this. Look around the hardware world today, and you'll see dozens of consultancies & outsourcing platforms that are dedicated to making manufacturing a black box. Their aims are good: to alleviate the strains of launching a hardware product. But the results can be highly problematic.

Designers who aren't knee deep in the making of their products are taking huge, unknown risks. Out of sight/out of mind is a recipe for avoidable mistakes.

Throwback

Me, late in 2009.

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The Prepared.

Get Prepared, my (weekly?) mailing list. 

Old (ish) goals

Me, last June: 

i have spent a while recently thinking about what, exactly, i have liked about my career. a few points:

1. i like being appreciated.
2. i like being compensated.
3. i like being a little over my head. i prefer to stay right on the edge between the things i know i don't know and the things i don't know that i don't know.
4. i like collaborating with people who are better at what they do than i am.
5. i like having an understanding of long-term objectives, and i like being a significant factor in the achievement of those objectives.
6. i like working with people like myself.
7. i like being fully responsible for the execution of a project, however large or small.
8. i like working on a new thing that will change some part of the world.
9. i like working in emerging markets.
10. i like working on things that people like me want, and want to interact with intimately.
11. i like for the product values and interests that i have to overlap significantly with those of my collaborators and our product's users.
12. i like being rewarded for my ability to identify, assess, analyze and solve problems, and i like it when those problems require me to learn about a new area of the world.
13. i like clear objectives - and clear metrics by which they can be judged - over aesthetic, or "gut" feelings.
14. i like working on general purpose technologies.
15. i like working on cross-functional teams, and having responsibilities in many categories of business

I like this. Probably worth updating.

What should we all do

Steven Sinofsky, talking on the a16z podcast about how real-time metrics tracking has changed the nature of management (edited for readability):

If you think about the average large company meeting, the vast majority today start off with somebody showing up and passing out a printed version of a work product. You just don't see that in a company of less that a thousand people. And the interesting thing about it is that it's not just that everybody got emailed the attachment for the meeting. It's that [managers] are looking at things like live data. So when managers at a small company look at their current telemetry of their app, their site, their service, they're all looking at the actual tools that are used by the marketing team to manage that information. They're not looking at a snapshot from even a few hours earlier. So you cut out all of this "well, those numbers aren't ready, let me go do them." You don't have presentations where a picture of the numbers are embedded in the presentation. 

These are these huge cultural shifts in how you manage an organization. What a manager's role is in a meeting is not to be reported to, because if you wanted to know, you should just go visit the place that everybody on the team is using to keep track of their information. 

Then when you get everybody together, it shouldn't be to argue the pros and cons of how the information was gathered or is it the right number... It should be: We all agree, this is the number. What should we all do to change that number?

Mere potential

Zakary Tormala, writing about our surprising preference for potential - even over achievement. Emphasis mine.

We designed several ads in Facebook promoting a comedian who was growing in popularity at the time of our study. One ad said, “Critics say he has become the next big thing,” and another said, “Critics say he could become the next big thing.” The “potential” ads produced more than three times the click-through rate and five times the fan rate.

Matrix managing

I had never heard this term, but I like it. From an interview in Solid State Technology with Margaret Blohm, Chief Scientist and Leader of Nanotechnology at GE Global Research, emphasis mine:

Q: What challenges do you face in managing nanotechnology research programs and scientists?

The challenge of dealing with a lot of enthusiasm and making sure we stay on track with business impact and not just really cool technology. It can be hard on folks who have a good idea that’s not ready for a specific business use. An even bigger challenge is doing matrix managing. I’ve never been a fan, but I love it now. Matrix managing is the process of influencing organizations or departments or other structures where you don’t have individuals directly reporting to you, to help them recognize the mutual benefit of what they are working on.

I matrix manage the people on the various research teams. I reach in to their team and work with them. For example, a chemist is on one team and can join my team as well. It’s usually a management nightmare, but it has worked here. It’s communication both ways. They aren’t isolated from business challenges and opportunities. Matrixing helps do that.

Search terms

I can't tell whether to be flattered by this or what.

FWIW I am proud of most of these, especially "coined countersinks," for which I am *bafflingly* the top result. I also have reason to believe that a good number of the unprovided search results are for DMLS pricing, which is more exciting to me than the fact that someone wants to see me (or some lesser Spencer Wright) in the nude.

PCBA

PCBA, recently @ The Public Radio:

We've got about a dozen beta radios out in the wild right now, and are working on an additional 10 or so. There are a few small hardware revisions that are yet to be made, but the overall design is about right, and we'll be rolling out a larger launch in the coming months. Stay tuned. 

Make. Equity. Deals.

From a good article on Susan Kare, who (among other things) designed the great early GUI icons for Apple. 

In exchange for a pre-IPO purchase of Apple stock, Xerox allowed Jobs and his engineering team three days’ access to PARC to scope out the Alto and its development tools.

*So* good to deal in equity.