Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabilt | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested to know what HN thinks this means for hardware startups. Is this a case of Chumby not executing well enough or is it too hard to build a hardware startup? I think it's the former, but many people out there including investors seem to think otherwise. Some even go as far to say it is not worth doing a hardware startup because software scales soo much easier.

View on HN

Like a lot of failed companies, they built a product the market had no need for. I don't think this reflects at all on hardware startups - just poor investment.

Hardware startups can be very risky..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Very risky, but not all failures.

Square, FitBit, MakerBot, Nest, Tesla

I don't think Square counts as a hardware startup.

Food for thought, is a bank that only provides internet banking services and providing a 2-factor auth dongle a hardware company?

In fairness, I doubt most traditional banks actually design their own 2-factor authentication hardware. But yeah, calling Square a hardware company is nevertheless a stretch. (particularly as the hardware component is a freebie/loss-leader IIRC)

All of these companies are great, but have any of these companies reached sustainability? Most seem like they are still in investment stage and are trying to grow the company. I guess Square is the only exception here because they have a secondary revenue which is transactional payments.

C'mon, bad example. CueCat was dead at birth: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html

It's hard to say from the outside whether the hardware was what killed them. Increasingly, hardware lives and dies by the software that comes with it. If they were building it today, they'd probably be basing it on Android or bits of WebOS or something and "standing on the shoulders of giants," to overuse that phrase some more. (i.e. reduce the effort going into the software stack) And the ARM chips and mobile browsers of today are quite a bit better, too. So maybe they were just ahead of their time. Or maybe they just didn't see the iPhone and iPad coming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com