The original Hard Stuff thesis

Back in June, 2023, I was considering leaving my exciting job as a hardware product developer in Paris to start a new consultancy- mixed with incubator-style hardware accelerator. Professionally I'd worked in Venture Capital, Incubators, for startups, and now alongside them in an engineering/CTO-like capacity; and despite always loving the WHAT of what I was doing, I never seemed to love the WHY. And then one day in June it hit me: we weren't building stuff that matters. We innovate out of luxury, not out of necessity. I decided to go for it, and over the course of a few strong coffees and a gazillion phone calls with friends and peers in the World of startups, I decided it was time to get busy, and work on hard stuff.

After finding my awesome co-founder Nick Bond , moving myself back to the UK, and building our first impact hardware lab in a shed in my garden: it was 4 months later, November 2023 - exactly one year ago - and Hard Stuff was born.

Below are the notes that I wrote that day in June '23, lifted copy-paste from my original Notion page, and despite a year of iterating and learning, it still - at least to me - rings true. A few things have changed, a few priorities have been shifted. The WHAT might be in development, but the WHY sure as hell suits me.

Apologies in advance for the spelling mistakes and punctuation errors, but I opted not to fix these in order to keep the exact text the same.

START OF NOTES

1 minute pitch

Our Climate, our Seas, our Forests, our Societies, our Priorities, and our Futures are broken. Most of the biggest challenges to humanity are solved predominantly in the hardware space, be it in hardware products or in human action. Yet, looking at the startup, VC and Incubator landscape in the UK we’ve found a disproportionate amount of investment, brain power, and time is being put towards more secondary products. Productization for products’ sake is a luxury we can’t afford to prioritise. This is not the time for innovation as a luxury, this is the time for innovation as a necessity.

Hard Stuff exists to unlock the next generation of hardware startups that will solve our World’s toughest challenges.

• We do this first as a technical incubator, working alongside young companies to help validate and then help build Minimum Viable Products to ensure that they’re building the Hard Stuff that solves real problems while being financially viable.
• We identify the gaps in the hard stuff that aren’t yet being built, and we build new startups to address these key problem areas. This is a venture studio that puts impact and financial-sustainability on equal footing, defining a “unicorn” as something that HELPS billions of people.
• And finally we champion the amazing progress that’s already being made in the much wider Hard Stuff network, through events and workshops, and brainstorming with changemakers and entrepreneurs about what needs to be built next.

Secrets

• Technical Matt and a couple of selected freelancers can build almost anything to MVP level. We have a strict definition of what an MVP is and work closely with founders to figure that out. It’s absolutely not freelance and forget!
• Business Model We have a unique business model that forms win-win-win partnerships between the investors, the startups, and the problems to solve.
• Problem Roadmap and Conviction We have a strict technical and problem roadmap to follow, twinned with a tight lens of what is considered “high value to society”.

Why

• Climate change, deforestation, food insecurity, and segregation are all hardware problems. You can’t eat software, and you can’t replant trees with AI.
• Yet when you look so much money and great brain power that goes into the current “climate startups” or “agritech startups” are centred around software products, about offering auditing or AI optimization or carbon credit marketplaces. Money and great brain power that could have gone into more physical solutions that actually reduce CO2 output or actually improve crop yields.
• And so much money and great brain power that goes into the current hardware startups are centred around VR/AR, or real-estate sensors, or quantum computers. Cool things, that definitely should exist eventually…
• But now the world is on fire, and people are still starving, and we’re months away (or years if we’re lucky) from multiple humanity-extinction tipping points.
• Now is not the time for trinkets, gadgets, and gizmos. Now is not the time for marketplaces, Web3, and crypto wallets. Now is the time for real hardware, and the really hard stuff.

How

• Hardware is hard. Long lead times, complex development processes, and expensive components all make hardware far more difficult to build and scale than software:
• Well, we want to make hardware easier by building alongside teams with great ideas, using our unique rapid development approach to unlock Proof of Concepts all the way up to scale, in a much more economic way.
• We want to make scaling and deployment easier by having experienced teams dedicated to valorizing High Value to Society ideas, industry partners that are willing to test and deploy new ideas with us (along with an opportunity to invest).
• We also want to champion the solving of the hard stuff. Celebrate exciting companies actually building hardware solutions

What

This is the big picture, where I want to get to eventually. I need help deciding where to start, and what needs to happen between now and then.

Hardware Venture Studio

A venture studio (AKA startup studio) that evaluates all ideas through the lens of “direct High Value to Society”. This means we don’t build “enablers” (”Our tool will enable people to build better materials” etc.), we build the actual hardware companies from scratch that actually build the actual hardware.

Hardware Incubation Studio/Bolt-on

Startups and entrepreneurs can come to us for weeks to months at a time to unlock next stages of their development. This often involves funding but also dedicated services in engineering, scaling, marketing, and High-Value to Society evaluation. We take these on a rolling-basis (no cohorts or phases, just work with folks when they actually need it!).

Hardware MVP Services (optional)

We’ll work with large and small companies to critically test their ideas and help prove ideas with Minimum Viable Product services. Our teams will not include builders and makers, but sales experts to prove market potential, and sustainability advisors to prove climate-ethics.

Hard Stuff champions

Just on the side we’ll run multiple events a year, have an open-access lab and co-working space for hardware startups, and have a dedicated jobs and news board so folks can know about the latest and greatest solving hard stuff.

END OF NOTES

Hard Stuff still has a long way to go as a builder of the future, and we're actually focussing more on the Hardware MVP Services at the moment because, in some regards - I was wrong: There ARE amazing startups out there building hard stuff, and making the World better, so our priority right now is making them as great as they can be. But, I believe, Hard Stuff has a future as an incubator, or venture studio, or even investor, or something else; just some way where we can be far greater than the sum of our parts. I'll keep you updated with that as we go.

Until then, here's to another year of building Hard Stuff ??