danimal88

Sure. Tbh, I didn't really want this comment to be an opportunity to pitch my company or make it too specific about our solution as there are many different types of solutions, categories and problems that could use innovation capital that are second in line.

flair.co is us.

We have taken money from investors, those that aren't afraid of energy problems, that aren't afraid of energy efficiency, and that invest in meaningful problems (and some others too, but much better portfolio mixes than most). Things are (minus covid 19) changing. We are already a key transitional electrification solution, we are solving peak problems on the grid, and we are poised through a few partnerships to redefine home energy consumption in North American homes. I'm adding that for context as our website doesn't publicly lay that out.

All that said, I'm so thankful for the investors that we do have. They listened to our larger vision from the get go, focus on meaningful problems, and put their money where their mouth is. Now that we are realizing this vision, they will realize returns and leadership ROI as this particular blog post fades into the past.

I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions for buildings. People do want them. VCs, less so, unless it's as high margin as a photo sharing app, destructive and lucrative as consumable businesses like Kurig, etc.

Consumers don't know what they want until the possibilities are presented to them. VCs are literally the gate keepers of much innovative possibilty at the early phases of enterprises. It's not an issue with want, it's that making a quick buck for VCs doesn't come from capital intensive, long ROI cycle businesses. Other asset classes may be better about this but they tend to participate at less innovative stages.

You'd think an easy enough change to the laws around IP for medical equipment would be that if they can't supply critical parts, particularly under extreme circumstances, they most hold harmless any supplier that is able to supply said parts.

Kind of crazy they couldn't find somebody to swap with

In general, it feels like this sort of company as a venture backed company is a waste of time. I understand you can create a 'brandless as a brand' company and make people think they are getting more for less, but this is literally just an exercise in consumerism and customer acquisition. I don't love that nonduraable CPG is controlled by a small handful of conglomerates but I also wish VCs would ignore this type of play and work on doing something more meaningful. I understand that there are and will be investors in different categories, but things like this feel like venture backed plastic pollution as a lifestyle brand.

Assuming your bug fix mechanism is bug free...

Hard to say. One way is that they say got 100K in sales on 10K in ads. Then they said, hm, lets take 50K from sales and put it into more ads so we can get 500K in sales and the remaining 40K went to tooling/production. When that 50K ad buy didn't really pan out, now they have 40K towards fulfilment which probably doesn't meet their suppliers MOQ if it even covered the NRE (non recurring engineering) and tooling. Its more or less the same problem that all companies encounter when they do preorders/crowdfunding/etc.

There is a solution of course - you need to raise enough money (or commit, in the case of Tile founder who should have had enough personal capital to make this work) to never be in a financial position that you couldn't simply return all your customers money in the event that the product or business didn't make sense. As long as you can gaurentee that you hold onto enough money for the returns, you are operating responsibly. If you take 100% of the money you get from sales and commit it, you cant take back ad spend or tooling/engineering spend. Is it fraudulent - I'm not sure. Is it irresponsible - most definitely.

It would seem then that the real business opportunity here is probably in reselling used legos on an as needed basis.

You buy or just get donated legos from people that no longer use them and then you can sell custom sets for people by running through the semi sorted bins and creating the order. So you don't want to sell the machine but rather, sell Legos. Perhaps the main issue is whether resale rights are allowed but seems solvable.

Just a though on the 200-300 buckets - perhaps you could create buckets in a grid and then just have the grid or dropper move around - once you know which bin is most appropriate for the part, the process of placing in the grid at that point seems relatively simple with just X and Y movement :)

Engineers like to hire engineers (and designers/product people). I think its because the utility and scope tend to be pretty obvious and you can always see more and more to build. As a founder with an engineering past (although you never stop being an engineer!), I always find it a bit trickier to hire the non technical parts because you need to do their jobs first to really know what you need and generally, you need to navigate more ambiguity in an area of the business where you have less training and experience. That said, for the right products and business, you can probably get a way with borrowing resources from engineering for some marketing - I find that engineers with high EQ often make great digital marketers assuming they have some creative/content generation skills because they can really tune ads and think about the whole funnel in a very technical and numerical way. I have also found that it helps to have entirely nontechnical for the creative and advertising as well as there are a lot of places where engineers just can't always see past their engineering goggles.

I'm worried about being on the road with these. If they are as indestructable as suggested/demonstrated, it seems like everyone else on the road becomes the crumple zone for both vehicles. Perhaps the anti-dent is different from crumple zone considerations, but definitely a bit intimidating to share the road with.

And does it only come in one color (stainless)?

"[Designed to drive on mars]"

Premature Optimization if I have ever heard of it.

I run a company (https://flair.co) that builds a device you could use but is admittedly out of your proposed price range. That said, it's consumer/prosumer grade and you can network as many as you want together. You need at least one to be wired so it has enough power to fire up wifi and the rest can be run wired or on batteries. They mesh over a 915MHz radio and temp/humidity/light/pressure. We have been contemplating building a cheaper headless unit (these have a fancy little E-ink display) but haven't done it yet.

The actual device is here: https://flair.co/products/puck

There is a full fledged API (api.flair.co), desktop (my.flair.co) and apps of course. For what you are looking for, there is plenty of plotting built in but you can also export the data from the app as a csv/spreadsheet or grab it from the api.

Anyhow, it's definitely over your targeted price point but functionality wise, I think it does everything you might want.

Paywalled so can't read the whole thing.

In general, my understanding is that it is NOT exactly what happened. We are putting tariffs on ALL IMPORTS from China, whether designed, maintained, operated by a US corp or a Chinese corp.

A better policy would have recognized that there is a distinct difference between Chinese and US corps looking to sell into the US market.

The simplest example would be anything internet connected product with software. If the design, software, marketing etc. is all largely in the US and just the physical product is manufactured in China, it seems like a reasonable economic policy to say that China can keep the manufacturing business and the US corps can continue to do this - largely because it acknowledges the reality that US manufacturing for high volume/low mix is simply not going to be competitive and if it is, it will only be due to automation.

Leaving the manufacturing in place but blocking Chinese market access would impart substantial hardship to Chinese companies who are able to ignore US Trademark, IP, deceitful advertising/low quality (read other threads on this HN post), all the while largely not interrupting US businesses.

It would have provided needed leverage while avoiding doing damage to US business and consumers.

I don't understand why the US puts up with this while largely being denied market access to China. In my mind, it would be more symetrical to have applied tariffs to brands that aren't incorporated and substantially operating in the US and are imported into the US from China. This would help American businesses by having American consumers buy quality items from US companies, even if a substantial portion of the product was built in China.

This is really missing the ESP8266 imho

Bayer is a filthy company that should have been shut down after being a key Nazi collaborator along with IBM, Siemens and others. Sure, they might be the victim of some cyber warfare, but in aggregate, they will never be a victim in my book, just a giant enterprise built on murder.

https://ahrp.org/auschwitz60-year-anniversary-the-role-of-ig...

Yep.

https://ahrp.org/auschwitz60-year-anniversary-the-role-of-ig...

Its definitely a monopoly but I think this as much derives from the redundancy of running multiple cables/fibers/etc. hence a lot of these are natural monopolies. It's why utilities are handled the way they are as well. Similar concept applies to roads hence why roads are usually publicly owned. Having competing roads wouldn't really make that much sense...

All that said, I'm hoping wireless solutions change this scenario. Effectively, if I can run a 5G (or w/e) hotspot connected to my router, the latency/throughput is good enough, I'm pretty much cool ditching my wired options. A monopoly on the wireless side is still possible (spectrum can be a limiting reagent), but I think it's much less likely to devolve into our current ISP dynamic. I'm certain there are plenty of technical issues with going all wireless but it doesn't seem insurmountable.

Was looking for the same thing but didn't see after skimming...

I really hate the casualness with which returns are assumed to work. Many goods aren't resellable after being returned with the end result being that they simply get thrown away. Its soooo wasteful.

We basically just looked on Alibaba for factories that could do all the metal work that we needed, sent them a quotation package, set up a tour, confirmed their ISO:9001, negotiated terms, and were off to the races. If you have a CM where everything is received for final delivery it helps as they can do your IQC so your metal supplier accountability is baked in. At least thats what has worked for us.

I have quoted for parts in both the US and China. What I have seen is that generally, tooling is noncompetive - I got quotes for 22X the cost in the US...!

That said, the advice we got from most of the people we were quoting with was to get the tools made in China, import them to the US and produce the parts locally. We didn't end up doing that but I remember being amazed at the crazy tool quote arbitrage...

TI chips can be quite affordable.

TBH, 'Custom aluminum extrusion' - this is not a big deal at all. In China, the tool for this is < $1k and for what appears to be about 6 inches, perhaps its a dollar's worth a material if it was WAY overpriced, most likely less than 50 cents. And the tool will last for a long time...

A friend of mine runs this company, similar but I think actually better for sleep/circadian rhythms: https://circadia.health/

I build controls for many heatpumps (https://flair.co/pages/mini-splits-and-window-units) and follow the space pretty closely. They are truly magical with respect to pumping heat from the cold outdoors into a warm indoor space.

That said, the efficiency gains on the energy consumption side are admirable. From a global warming standpoint however, heat pumps are actually still pretty bad because of the refrigerants.(https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-man...) This is not an issue with more traditional electric heaters (resistive or otherwise).

The real calculus for those concerned with global warming (I understand this was not the topic of the writeup) is the net effect of these systems over their lifetime - aka, Energy Saved and its GHG effect via leveraging a heat pump vs the GHG effect from the release of the refrigerant. Perhaps the real win would be a refrigerant recovery business that is...air tight :)

Sticky/Elastic windows was definitely my favorite compiz option. It was just so ridiculous and entertaining.

I'm 100% as interested in Market Access as I am with IP theft. I'm sure there are small and large companies with IP concerns but overwhelmingly, this is a large companies game since they are the ones doing really heavy R&D lifting on new materials and technologies. For startups, genuine market access to China would be such a fantastic opportunity.

If only we demanded more of the violence industry rather than the sex policing industry.