ATOMS 2017 is over! During this one-day conference in Paris, we tackled various hardware-related questions with expert panels featuring veteran investors and top hardware founders. Here’s a quick recap of some highlights, insights and stories of the day.
Software comes and goes but hardware is forever. Hardware Club’s community represents a cumulative $700+M in VC funding and over $80M in crowdfunding alongside a wide array of iconic hardware and consumer brands across the IoT, drone, robotics and sensor industries. At its core, it has always been a community of founders helping each other.
ATOMS was an opportunity to share first-hand testimonies and insights from our community and network whilst also highlighting the emerging ecosystem trends for the public.
To do this, we brought together 400 top founders, partners, VCs and hardware enthusiasts to the Forum des Images in Paris. In just one day, 26 expert speakers covered 18 key topics redefining the rapidly evolving hardware industry.
“Customer switching cost, economies of scale, network effects, platforms are all moats.” — Christian Smith, co-founder of TrackR
It all began with Christian Smith, co-founder of TrackR, a startup that recently raised over $50M in series B funding. He outlined the importance of gaining a sustainable competitive advantage by building strategic moats. He also described his personal journey from conceiving an idea on a beach in California to starting a company in his garage to shipping 5 million units in a few short years.
“When VCs invest, they’re voting on what should be allowed to exist in the world.” — Kate McAndrew, associate at Bolt
Bolt associate and Women in Hardware founder, Kate McAndrew led our discussions on both investing in hardware and in nurturing communities of change within this space. Her presentation challenged us to address the unequal representation of women in all aspects of life, making the case that it was myopic and self-defeating to deny opportunity for all good ideas to rise to the top.
“We have to continue to make hardware in France, it’s a great engineering country and we have perfect help for that, but we are one of the worst countries to sell.” — Eric Carreel, co-founder of Withings
Veteran French entrepreneur Eric Carreel gave a deep insight into the state of the French and European tech ecosystem, arguing that although France had the engineers and expertise to make hardware, only the US supplies the real demand for these devices. He emphasised the importance of controlling your own sales online. Interestingly he advises hardware founders to wait to be pulled into retail, not to push.
“AI is incredibly hardware intensive” — Jerry Yang, general partner at Hardware Club
The panels delved into the underlying first principles governing investment in hardware. The speakers dove deep into the implications and evolutionary direction of AI and robotics. Doug Clinton of Loup Ventures made the case for hardware as a source of opportunity as “you collect a unique dataset that big players don’t have access to”. Gleb Chupilo, formerly of Clarion Capital and now Managing Partner at Rewired.ai delved deep into their $100M fund’s investment thesis: taking a step back from the idea of the robot to address instead how the machine perceives its world and its tasks.
“We thought it would change consumer’s lives. But sales weren’t supporting that. So we started listening to our customers.” — David Gengler, co-founder and CEO at Noke
David Gengler from Noke and Joacim Westlund from Shortcut Labs both illustrated an interesting trend: consumer hardware companies are pivoting to offer services, rather than devices as their core business. Both had designed products with a particular audience in mind and had been surprised by the unanticipated use-cases that their devices had created for themselves. The key lesson for the B2C to B2B transition? Listen, then be decisive in choosing a direction.
ATOMS is a day where different companies at different stages share and create the knowledge and energy that hardware startups need to flourish. Hardware offers unique problems, it’s vital to learn from those who have gone before. It’s vital to generating the energy and connections necessary to move forward. Be sure to discover the second edition of ATOMS San Francisco in 2018 #ATOMS18.
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