Why No Second Hardware Startups?

To me, it just seems like the nature progress of software industry: to make computers so important that eventually, hardware is cheaper to ship than software. Eventually.

;)

i also do some work with a company that does plasma coatings, also with a proprietary process that the owner (co-)invented. and it's a 4 person shop right now.

both people have done very smart work and made processes that have many compelling advantages over the existing state-of-the-art, with cost being a huge one, but it just takes a long-ass time to iterate and get good results from real, physical tests.

Isn't this obviously selection bias? Of course you don't hear much about one-failure-and-done entrepreneurs. Why would you, unless their failure was somehow exceptionally spectacular? But that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of them... there are likely many, many more of them than those that stick with it.

But where do I go to find people doing hardware and wanting to do hardware startups? Only thing I've ever heard of is Solid State Startups, but that's in the Valley (maybe I need to move?). Maybe Makerspaces, but those guys seem more interested in robots and other hobbies then starting their own thing.

I think there needs to be a hardware start-up weekend where hardware guys get together, hack some eval boards and try to get something they can launch on Kickstarter or something worth funding.

IBM, HP (to some extent) and others have actually been exiting the consumer hardware market. That's not a business I'd choose to start. And using Elon Musk as an example isn't really fair ... he's certainly created high-end hardware but only where there's a market void.