Second Wave Hardware

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Lemnos Labs, Eclipse, Silicon Valley Bank, and Cooley recently hosted an event called Second Wave Hardware in San Francisco.

We created another hardware event after much thought. Asking CEOs and founders to leave their teams and customers for a day is a significant request. We wanted to honor that request with an event focused on deep connections and content. Less being talked at and more networking amongst hardware peers. Our event goals were:

  • An “off the record” event (no press) so people could openly talk with their peers about challenges, best practices, and lessons learned. The best lessons often involve scars…
  • Most attendees had to be veteran entrepreneurs and hardware community members. We wanted leader/practitioners who each day face the challenges of scaling a hardware company after NPI (new product introduction). Marc Barros runs an amazing series of events for aspiring hardware entrepreneurs, so we wanted to compliment his work with an event for folks a bit later into the hardware life cycle.
  • We wanted attendees to network with three new members of the hardware community they didn’t know before. I was personally excited by the attendee list as it included people I had always wanted to meet and learn the story of how they created their products and teams.
  • We wanted each attendee to learn three new best practices for leading a hardware company that they did not know before.

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Our goal was to bring together hardware entrepreneurs who were a little deeper into their voyage; leaders who were scaling their companies after first product launches, whether consumer or enterprise. Shipping your first hardware product is hard, but it is not the top of the mountain, only the first base camp. Organization scaling, demand planning, financing options outside of venture capital, and success metrics were the topics of the day, with great fireside chats from experienced hardware leaders.

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While we won’t dive into the event itself per the “off the record” rule, we will say it is not a singular event. We are hosting dinner series and focused events around segments like space, applied robotics, consumer, enterprise, and next generation manufacturing. Second Wave Hardware is part of our continuing experiment to facilitate thoughtful, valuable discussions amongst the hardware community on scaling our businesses and solving the unique challenges we face as hardware entrepreneurs. More detailed, honest discussions and networking with peers; less speakers talking to large audiences with little detail.

We’d love to have you join the discussion. These events are small(ish) to facilitate great discussions, but there will be plenty of them. Please reach out if you are interested in learning more.

-eric

and Second Wave Hardware will be back in 2017!