Lowering the barrier to hardware startups is an awesome thing, of course. Hardware has a greater potential to directly impact lives at this point than software. There's tremendous software power locked up in the small, awkward-to-use computing devices we call phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and servers.
Hardware and Software startups are sufficiently different in their needs and life cycles that it would be specious to use the success of a particular program for the one as indicative of its suitability for the other. Similarly, the sorts of b2c startups that YC typically funds are sufficiently different from b2g startups like Palantir that I don't think you could claim Palantir would have benefitted from YC based solely on the experiences of b2c startups.
That is true. A better way to think of it, might be as an experiment. Do you remember when YC was started funding startups? The tech group-thought at the time: a toy, a joke, nothing serious, never to gain traction.
>some
>arguably
>far enough along
>yet
I don't mean to insult you or criticize your post in any way, partly because I agree with you, but that is a lot of qualifiers for one short sentence. Diplomatic tones require them though, I suppose.
Even if they were building their own sheet metal lockers, I still don't think they were a "hardware" company. They had a great service and that's what they were selling.
Bufferbox offered a service and didn't sell you a product therefore I don't think they were "hardware" company. The hardware was means to an end.
I don't think it lessens what they did. It was a good service.
Walmart has a large IT infrastructure, with sys admins and in-house developers. They also manage a lot of buildings, and warehouses. I wouldn't consider them an IT company, a property management company, or a logistics company.
I agree with your points regarding BufferBox, but I wouldn't say they are a hardware company producing a hardware product that you can sell to a customer. They were in an entirely different space, with very different set of challenges.
The YC post concerned companies that sell hardware to end users. Further, the initial post in this chain was someone asking if YC has had other hardware companies beyond Pebble. I don't think BufferBox is in that category.
Your manufacturing pipeline, volumes, service issues are all very different. So as great as BufferBox was I don't think they were a hardware company and certainly not for the purposes of this thread. I am not discounting their abilities or what they made but based on my experience they are apples and oranges.
Most of the problems kickstarter companies run into are unique supply chain, and manufacturing issues that BufferBox wouldn't have had to deal with.
Additionally, a big part of what BufferBox offered would have been in their app, and website. A locker that you can remotely lock and unlock is not difficult from an electronics point of view and had been around before.