Embedded - 186: Sleeping on the Factory Floor

Episode Date: February 9, 2017

Indrek Rebane (@RebaneIndrek) spoke with us about the Garage48 Hardware and Arts hackathon, hardware incubators in Estonia, linguistics, hydrology, and startup investments. Garage48 Hardware & Arts hackathon is February 17-19, 2017 at the Institute of Physics, University of Tartu (Tartu, Estonia). The event is organized by Garage48, University of Tartu and the Estonian Academy of Arts. Indrek is CTO of Build It Hardware Accelerator and electronics engineer for Hedgehog Engineering. Recommended book: The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you Other resources Indrek mentioned after recording: Why to Not Not Start a Startup by Paul Graham (blog) Why not to do a startup by Marc Andreessen (blog) Don’t Follow Your Passion by Ben Horowitz (video) Why Not To Do a Startup by Dave McClure (video)

Hello, I am Eliseo White. Welcome to Embedded. I'm here with Christopher White, and our guest this week is Indrek Rebane, organizer and mentor at the Garage48 Hardware and Arts Hackathon. Hi, Indrek. Welcome to the show. Hello. Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Well, a little bit. Professionally, I have been involved in the electronics industry since 2002. Non-professional even more. For about a decade, I was working on video hardware. And after that, I was working on video hardware. And after that, I realized that there's so much more in the world than making the perfect video solutions for airports and other places. And I started my own engineering company with a few fellow engineers. And on from there, joined Build-It Hardware

Accelerator as a person who takes care of everyone following the laws of physics. Things have changed quite a lot since then. Mostly to the teams

who are trying to build it. I have many questions about many of those things, including the hardware accelerator. But first, I would like to try a new thing. Instead of lightning round, and don't send me email, lightning round will be back. But instead of lightning round this week, we would like you to tell us either a joke or a fact that you find strangely interesting.

It's more like a story. It's about how I got a bit closer with computers when I was four or five years old. My both parents worked at Polytechnics Institute and cybernetics department. And when I was four or five, I visited my father there and then leaned against the wall. Well, it turned out it was not the wall, but it was a mainframe computer that was filling the wall. And one of the switches flipped. Which I quickly flipped back as a reaction. But I had a room full of people staring at me with strange looks.

And my father explained to me that this is not a light bulb. You cannot just switch it on and off. So after that, I realized that computers are a bit more interesting than light bulbs. There's lots of light bulbs strung together. What was the switch? I have no idea, but everyone was running around after that. It was one of those large Russian mainframes. Wasn't running like a nuclear power plant or anything.

Probably doing some scientific calculations for oil shade industry. Okay, so you do have an accent that is different than ours. And you are 10 hours in time from where we are. So let's just cover that. Where are you talking to us from? I'm right now in Tartu, Estonia, which is quite close to where I was born. Estonia is a small country. We have about a million people and we speak quite a different language. So we are next to Russia, we're next to Finland, and often people ask if Estonian language is something like Russian, and then we have to say sorry no this is totally different language group. Russian language is something like English,

Estonian language is completely different. So this may be maybe one of the reasons that fenagric languages are language isolates and they are affecting culturally quite a lot on how we think. I have found that with language lessons that learning other languages definitely enables different thoughts. Yes, it definitely is true for different assembly languages. Even for different people languages. Indeed, indeed. I can bring some examples. For example, in English, people are having dreams. In Estonian language, people are seeing dreams. Okay. And that's, these are two quite different things. Yeah. I think yours makes more sense.

And there's an old joke that the Estonian language has no sex and no future. And that's also true. Back to the dreams. Which language is it that has, we are being dreams? Because that would be a cool language to learn. All right. Enough with that for languages, because I do love linguistics and languages and how they're different. But that's not what the show is nominally about.

You are an organizer and mentor for Garage48 Hardware and Arts Hackathon. Could you tell us about it? Yes. Well, first, a little bit about Garage48. Garage48 is a non-profit organization, which is organizing hackathons since 2010. And so far, we have done 72 hackathons all around the world. Well, not exactly all around the world, Africa and Eastern Europe and Middle East mostly. But we never do hackathons in more developed countries. So it's it's been different from from many other hackathon series. When it comes to hardware and arts, so a few years ago, we discovered that people are having more and more hardware projects

and hardware ideas on software hackathons that we may now have a critical mass to do the hardware-dedicated hackathon. But why not extend it even further? So good hardware needs good design. We decided to do hardware and arts hackathon together with Estonian Academy of Arts. So Garage48 hardware and arts has been organized by Garage48, University of Tartu and the Estonian Academy of Arts, which is, in my personal opinion, quite strange to get several different universities working together, because often in everyday life they are competing.

In addition to organizing universities we have had other universities as sponsors and supporters for the event including the military academy and others. Well there are so many interdisciplinary things here that I wonder if the universities don't view themselves so much as competing here I mean there's cooperation between the artists and the engineers and the idea folks.

So, yes. And it is February 17th through the 19th in 2017, is that right? Yes, indeed it is. And in Tartu, Estonia. And so that's a weekend and it's 48 hours long and you actually use all 48 hours, don't you? Yes. It starts at Friday evening and ends at Sunday evening. Actually, once it was 49 hours because we had

the daylight savings time switch at the same time. That's cheating. That's cheating. That's cheating. Those people just cheated. But the setup is quite interesting because we don't have any preformed teams. For the upcoming event, we have 190 people registered.

We were planning to take about 150, but the good people kept flowing in. So somehow the list has now expanded to 190 participants. So everyone comes together on the Friday evening and everyone who has an idea can pitch it in the front of the audience. And after that, everyone can join every team. However, if the team has only one member, it will be discarded. If the team has only two members, it will be discarded. If the team has only three members, it will be discarded.

If the team has only engineers, it will be discarded. If the team has only designers, it will be discarded. If the team has only designers, it will be discarded. And same with business people. So we look into creating interdisciplinary teams and teams who can actually deliver what they promise. So statistics so far show that about 50% of the projects that are presented get the team together. And the people who ideas were not approved, they can join the other teams and they will join the other teams. So all the teams are formed on spot.

How long does that take? That takes most of the Friday. Yeah. Six to eight hours. Is there conflict during that process? Do people get upset? Yes. Especially if you have a single founder for the idea who has no team and he says, no, I can do it all alone. But we're trying to push the interdisciplinary interaction there

and really want to have functioning teams so people can sleep in shifts. What's the maximum size of your team? We're looking to teams size four to eight people. In extreme situations, maybe 10 people. But it has to be a in extreme situations maybe 10 people but it has to be a good team to have 10 people otherwise with two large teams you have you have provenance that you cannot handle the team anymore yeah you end up with communication problems if your team gets too big exactly okay so friday night you argue about what your team is

and what your idea is, and you join a team that has something interesting. But what kind of ideas are we talking about? A weekend isn't really very long to get things done. What are the ideas at that stage? Let's bring out some of the winners of previous garages. There was a startup who actually formed a startup afterwards, and they got investment and it was kind of successful for a while, called Heelosophy. They were making insoles for high heeled shoes, which will measure where the friction between the shoe and the fit is largest and then figure out what kind of install do you need to make the heels less

painful. And from other extremes, we had military jamming radar, which also got an investment, which was interesting. Okay, those are pretty different ends of the spectrum there. And we had lots of very interesting robotics projects. We have kind of like permanent members or permanent participants from Latvia, which is a small country next to Estonia, who always come, they have the craziest ideas and their ideas are always done with very good engineering. So last year they were doing a helmet that helps to keep your hairstyle in the bad weather, which looked in the end, something like from the movie Mars Attacks.

Yeah, I bet. And had 12 different sensors inside for I don't know what kind of reasons. So they don't all have to be... Practical? Socially relevant? No, no, definitely not. People are coming there to meet other people. People are coming there to have fun and

to work under stress. I read a blog post that involved the Crazy Latvians which I guess is sort of a team name. Do people come as a team? Do they come already sort of formed? You said there was the team forming process but

are there groups yes sometimes uh they come but you can always join another team in that sense uh so there are no uh no fixed teams that okay we are here eight people we will not accept anyone else go away so we are trying to take care that the event is for everyone and they get the good experience. Excellent. And so they work all weekend and then Sunday, there's some sort of judging process? Yes, on Sunday, they will do their final presentation. While on the Friday, they have 90 seconds to present the idea. Then on Sunday, they have twice as long, three minutes.

However, they cannot use any PowerPoint slides. Yay! They cannot use any pre-recorded videos or anything else. The only thing you can show and talk about is your working prototype. Working. Air quotes around the working. Well, let's say legal definition of working is very wide. Yeah.

And you have mentors. What do the mentors do? Mentors go around the teams and see that they are doing things okay and helping out where they can. For example, on one of the Garage events in Ukraine, in Kiev, where I was mentoring, I had a very good chance to learn Java, which I didn't know before. But one of the teams was quite stuck in debugging their Android application. And I had to quickly learn Java to fix their bugs there.

That's exciting. But usually mentors know beforehand what their expertise is. I mean, your background is mostly electronics, is that right? Yes, but I have written quite a lot of software in my life. Yeah, sure. Figure out Java in a couple of hours in order to get the team back on track. No problem. Yeah.

So the mentors don't get to sleep either, huh? No, that depends on the mentor, but some don't. So I am based in the US. Actually, I've lived most of my career in the Silicon Valley ivory tower of sharks. So my perspective is relatively limited. Do you know how technology and engineering and all of this is different in Estonia versus other areas or Europe in general? There is one very, very big difference. Estonia was part of the Soviet Union during Russian occupation. Then quite a lot of infrastructure was non-existent in

the 90s. So instead of repeating everyone else's mistakes, we started skipping those and re-implemented many things. examples to fill in text declaration it takes me about 15 minutes i can do it online and all the things are pre-filled almost to start a company sure because the government knows all that information. Why do they make you fill it out twice, essentially? Exactly. And now the new initiative is to go to tax declaration, free declaration of taxes, which means it will be even easier.

This will be implemented in the following few years. Another example is how easy it is to start a company. Last time I started a company, it took me 47 minutes. I did it Friday evening at home. I suspect some companies must be formed

at the hackathon then. I think there have been none. But you could. You could, but there are more important things to be done. But in principle, you could, yes. And Estonia has the e-residence program where anyone can,

I'm not even sure exactly that I understand what that is, but you can get a government-issued identity card even if you don't live there. Yes. And what it gives you is that you can digitally sign legally binding documents. You can access your bank accounts, do money transfers, things like that. That's kind of neat.

It's a governmental marketing program, I could say. Yeah, there is some of that. But the idea is that Estonia has had its ID card and mobile ID, which means you can digitally sign things from your mobile phone for quite a long time now. And it's just a good a good idea to extend it outside of Estonia because it's just a million people versus seven billion. Quite a difference. And you had not the advantage, I guess that's the wrong word. But as you said, you kind of started from a clean slate in the 90s exactly well rebuilding new infrastructure versus maintaining old it's the same pot of money municipal money and if you can build new infrastructure you do usually get better

stuff which is why we should burn it all down no No, that's not right. No, that's not a good idea. No, no. Okay, back to hardware, actually. You work at a hardware accelerator. You mentioned it, a built-it hardware accelerator. And you mentioned that it has changed over time. How has it changed? Well, when we started, what was it now, four years ago, then we did kind of classical accelerator model. We have three months program, people come in with their teams, show progress,

do their prototype, meet hundreds of people. and now we have evolved into one month program not investing much in the beginning and then within one month figuring out which teams or which companies are worth to follow up afterwards and then work closer with those. Because it's more important to say no than it is to say yes. And having this early filter has proven to be a very wise decision. Do you find yourself saying no to the idea, to the technology or to the people most often well it's um mostly

mostly to technology but uh no to technology means things can be changed quickly no to people means things usually cannot be changed quickly people are hard. Hardware is easy. Yeah, but some people are not necessarily geared at this point in their lives to be founders and startups. Indeed, and then they should not be. Because if you're starting a startup, that will rob your life away, existing life away for the next three or four years. Yes. And that's hard. If you have a mortgage and family, then I would not recommend it.

You know, Microsoft pays quite good salaries, for example. If you have a nice job there, then don't start a startup. Not unless you have a burning desire for it. I mean, you have to have

a huge amount of passion so all right okay so technology is one way people fall out and people can be another way but the good thing with the ideas is that they can and have to be changed usually it's this concept of product market fit where to find a good fit you have to change both the product and the market. It's hard to change the market. Not necessarily. If you don't have a market yet, then it's very easy. Oh, all right. That's fair. I thought we were changing the minds of the people, not just finding a better market for our idea. You have to change all the components and you have to be ready to accept changes

and you have to know when to change and when not to change because if you have 20 people giving you advice, then you have 21 different opinions. Designed by committee is seldom my favorite way to receive products. Products that are designed by committee tend to be much worse than somebody with a great idea who passionately followed through. I would say that if you look into the holy triangle, the holy trinity of design, engineering and business, then these three components have to be in every product. But if the product is design-driven, then engineering has to do magic and business has to do some magic.

If it's engineering-driven, then then most of designers will quit and business has to do some magic if it's business driven then things usually will be designed and engineered with one very special

feature called sellability and not necessarily reliability. Sometimes, sometimes not. There are so many different types of reliability. If you look into product failures, then what is often looked at is the first failures in the product lifecycle you sell the device and it comes back as broken this is usually manufacturing issue what people

think about reliability when they're buying product they're thinking about how long the product will last so the the time to failure is what's very important. And one of the misconceptions in engineering is that the engineers have to do everything as strong as possible. I would counter that and say, no, engineers have to do everything as weak as possible. That affects price. I mean, you want it to be as cheap as is saleable.

And you don't want it to be over-engineered. That's how we end up with million-dollar toilets. Exactly. And the customer is the one who will pay for that, the over-engineering, in the end. Yeah. And also, not only in the money, but also in time,

because things will be late. When I worry about reliability in my consumer daily life, it is more about the fact that sometimes I can't turn on the TV because I have so many devices that are built just good enough to sell

and yet not quite reliable enough to listen to the command from the remote that is just good enough to sell that sort of stack of house of cards that we end up with the internet of things and other consumer devices yeah other swear words. That should be it. Yes, this brings us to user experience design, which I think is one of the most important things in product design. There's no point of designing a perfect product or engineering a perfect product

when users find it absolutely unbearable to use. Exactly. And we talked a while back over email very briefly where I was mentioning a lot about Arduino prototypes in mass production and how clients sometimes come to me with their prototypes and they they think they're done and that it's just going to be trivial to produce it in large quantity and then you emailed and said we should have a conversation about that and we never did so let's have it now sounds like a good plan yes Yes. In our engineering company, Hedgehog, we get those requests all the time. Yeah, we have this first prototype.

It's almost ready for production. It's based on Arduino and Cardboard Box. Yes, exactly. And then you have to look into all those issues. Cost, power consumption, reliability, and then certifications, EMC, in some cases, LVD, so that things don't burn down and don't burn anything else down. But also you have lots of issues with, again, user experience.

Things need to boot fast. Things need to work out of the box. Things need to have upgradable firmware. And the end user doesn't need to know that the firmware is upgradable. One of the very nice user experiences is when you open some app to some wearable or other device and for the next 10 minutes it's saying that please do not move I'm uploading firmware to this another device. Yes I hate that. And lots of features like that. So usually everyone wants to do something that's smaller than a dime in size. And then they come with this 10 kilo box of Arduino and resistors.

That only plugs into a wall. They've never tried to make it battery. Right. We want it to last a month and be the size of a dime. Yes. Yes, yes. Indeed. So many. And you should never change the battery. Oh no.

Because there was a news item about some very efficient solar cells. So how do you deal with this? I mean, this is a problem and I deal with it a lot. How do you, what advice do you have for people who are dealing with such clients? We usually, we will have a quick physics crash course and another important aspect of this, this course, or let's say it's a very special discipline of physics. It's called

logistics. If you're building something, then you cannot just go to DigiKey, Moser, Farnell, SparkFun, wherever and say, I need 50,000 of those.

You usually cannot say I need 1,000 of those you usually cannot say I need thousand of those because no one wants to keep any stock of anything it's money and people don't like money lying around so that brings to manufacturing planning which is very bad thing because people do not like to plan anything. And you hear some new surprising things that it is totally okay for a component to have a lead time of 16 to 18 weeks, because as soon as you place the order, someone will start to manufacture that component for you.

And if you think about it from the other side, if you think about being the component, then that makes total sense. Of course, I'm not going to start building you thousands of this board until I have an order for it. And yet, as somebody who is building a board, they or me are often on the side of, why can't I have it tomorrow? Yes, because if you're ordering Uber, you will get it right away. Or if you want to get some fast food, you can get some fast food. Arduino is kind of fast food analog of electronics. You can get it fast, but if you're buying a hamburger, it's a hamburger. Well, and it's...

That analogy is interesting because people can respond to that, well, food is food, right? You know, I'm still alive eating fast food. Whereas with the Arduino stuff, you know, the argument is, oh, this thing works. I have this thing, it works. Why can't we just sell this? It's expensive, it's unreliable,

and it's bad for you. Yeah, yeah. In large quantities. In small quantities. I don't want to discourage anybody from Arduino, but in large quantities, it's bad for you. No, Arduino is bad for you. No, Arduino is great for prototyping.

You can get things done very fast. It has some problems like not having a proper debugger. Right. Yes. Which is kind of essential if you want to make anything reliable or want to spend less than two days trying to figure out where that bug is. But this is a problem that's not going away either. As Arduino gets more sophisticated, more sophisticated prototypes will keep occurring.

People aren't going to stop doing this. So it's a matter of creating a consistent education base that we can use to say, okay, you have this, but that doesn't mean you're done. Well, you were talking about having a crash course. Do you have blog posts or slides or anything? This is all an excuse for me not to have to write this blog post, by the way. I have done some six to eight hour lectures in two sessions

I suspect there will be a book out soon it's Arduino to mass production not that I'm writing it but I really have not written anything down in good and readable form but it is the same set of features.

As you say, it's firmware update. Power. Power and reliability and ruggedness. I mean, people do bring them in cardboard boxes, and you're like, no. And sometimes they have 3D printed enclosures, and you're like that's better but um how what else is on the list of things that you have to inform them educate them it's uh there are lots of lots of things in in manufacturing most people are concerned of concerned of what they call the most expensive item,

which is injection molding with anything that has plastics in it. And this is usually brought up because people don't have experience with it and they know that tooling costs are high. Yeah. But usually this is not the big problem. You have industrial designers

who know very well how to do things and they can get the good performance out of almost whatever is dreamt up. And I would not consider that the problem. Where the problems lie are long-term use of the product. Trying to bring some examples. One of my slides I had from this lecture, I had nice pictures of iPhone cables, which are not tourists and decomposing after a few years then there was

uh issue with the ipods uh where um they started coroning when people were sweating and uh barnes and noble had issues with nuke uh e-reader uh when it was incompatible with sunscreen. And lots of those decisions were made because things look good or things feel good, but long-term effects in real use were not really understood. No, those consumers, they do whatever they want. They're horrible. I'm not even talking about Galaxy Note 7 here. No.

Well, yeah, we shouldn't even talk about that. That would be a show unto itself. And these don't become the business cases they don't they aren't part of that that triangle you were talking about with engineering business and design there's like this another dimension of what the consumers actually do with your product that could be totally unforeseen and yet disastrous in spots? Yes, it's kind of like on another dimension. It's called experience maybe. And this is the black magic. There was one user experience designer who had

really excellent working methods for figuring out what people want. Whenever he was, sorry, whenever she was, I have to explain, Estonian language does not differentiate between she and he. That's cool. So whenever she was doing the test for a new product, she went to a coffee shop or in front of a coffee shop and offered to buy a coffee to anyone who was willing to test a new app or new device. And the feedback she got from there was amazing. Because what you really want to get for introducing a new product is the first impression from the

customer. This is the hardest one to get. You really have to be there. It's kind of like you have to do the hard things first. So you have to do the Arduino first because it doesn't scale. But you can get to the target really fast. You can just prototype, test, figure out what people want, figure out what people don't want, and then make some changes, make it more reliable, scale it by 10 times, and test with more people. Time to market is a huge feature. And you're talking about fast testing.

That's sort of a war between the accelerator part of your job and the engineering part. Because as an engineer, you know, things take time. But as someone trying to help people get to market you wanted to go as fast as possible how do you deal with that dichotomy well there are two ways uh it's either you figure out why you will be failing or it's you will be failing while it's too late to figure out so often you have to you just have to take the risk and and take the risk of delaying the product or take the risk of

having bad user experience there is no magic, there is no one formula that works. If you're starting a company, it's full of risks. So in case of more complex devices, you know how much money you have and if you know you can only do uh three or four prototypes then you must put maximum in to figure out that these prototypes are what people actually want if you have two years ahead then then you you're almost two years run away. You're almost living in a perfect world where you can do lots of user testing and hire lots of people to improve your product.

But on small projects, it's always taking risks. With a two-year runway, that sounds great from an engineering perspective, but you may miss your window and somebody else will have eaten your lunch. I have many clients, I don't have them because I don't usually work for them, but I find that many clients have kitchen sink features that they really want because it's sort of tangential but important and

they think it would be a differentiator. But I can see just looking at their whole system, they're going to cut those kitchen sink features later because they'll cost too much. And the clients cling to these for so long, so much longer than they should given it's clear it's not going to make it to the final design. Do you have to deal with that? How do you deal with it? Oh, all the time. Yeah. The hard thing with simple things is that

you cannot put simplicity in. You have to take complexity out. There's no way around it. And earlier you take it out easier easier so what often can be done is you can just show the data calculate some numbers and show the data if you're keeping those features for long long enough time then it's gonna cost you more in time and money even before you're out with your product often at least business oriented people tend to understand numbers quite well yeah that works well with the design or with the engineering and business people not so well with the design folks

but they don't tend to cling to these weird features for that long. Oh, but they tend to cling to weird surface finishes and exotic materials. I'm sorry, you can't have it in white plastic. That's too expensive and too hard. What advice do you have for someone listening who has an Arduino project they're really excited about and has been thinking about mass production? Are there a few points that you can really articulate that will help them?

Find help. Step one, find help. If you have an Arduino prototype and then want to get something out of it, then you have to figure out if this is really what people want. And that is hard. That's probably the hardest thing in business.

Well, there's two parts that are hard there. One is finding enough people to talk to. And two is a lot of people think their idea is special and they don't want to share it without NDAs. Well, first one is easy in that sense. You can find one

potential customer and then after talking with first customer expand your market by 100%. Right, find a second customer. Yes. And then continue from there.

That's some diminishing returns. Yes. But yes. It has, but with each and every iteration, after putting in the, or getting feedback from first customer, and second one and third one, after talking to each and every customer,

you modify your design product technology market model pricing and and then go to the next customer so you have those really fast build measured learn cycles and that's how by small steps and taking the hard things first, you can figure out early what your customers want. That way you can you can get rid of quite the many features. However, this is not easy in that sense that everyone wants the kitchen sink. And if you ask your mother if it's a good product, then your mother will always say, yeah, I will buy it.

Yeah, I was about to say, it's unlikely you're going to have a large sample size of people to be able to interact with as prospective customers. So you need to be very careful what you believe and what you accept as feedback. Some of it might be good and some of it might appear to be good but be wrong

because let's face it, the customer is not always right. So that's a difficult balance to strike, especially for somebody new to doing this. But there is one good way. If you're going and asking people if they would buy your product, and they say probably something like,

hmm, yes, I think I will buy it. Then you should say, can I have your credit card number, please? Yeah. And then you get honest feedback. That's very interesting. I think that's really important. And I know some companies I've worked with, they switch to not would you buy this,

but how much would you pay for this? And even then, if you ask them for their credit card afterwards for a lower price than they stated, they still didn't give it to you. So someone was lying there. Oh, they still didn't give it to you. So someone was lying there. Oh, they always are. There's a great book called The Mom's Test written about the subject. What is it called?

Mom's Test. The Mom's Test. Okay. I will find it. Link to it. It's by Rob Spatrick. Okay, so we were talking about advice for people with Arduinos. Find a customer and iterate quickly on what they say, as long as they have good advice and not bad advice.

Exercise left to the reader there. Yes. No one says it's easy. No. Well, that's the thing is people think it's easy. I think that's the difficulty, right? Because people now can do things that are amazing very quickly. And so they think it's easy, but then they hit this cliff.

And I put all this work into the Arduino prototype, so I must be done. That's the hardest thing for me to battle is this idea that they're done when they have only barely begun. You've just started. You've just proven you can do this, maybe. Do you have to worry about people who don't have enough money? All the time. How do you tell them how to estimate what they need?

Let's, I'll try to say it differently. the world has lots of money money money is lying around everywhere you just need to find it in that sense if you have something that people want then also people want to invest in it. Now the other question is, do you want investment? In lots of cases, you have situations where you're not ready to be invested into as a startup. It's either too early or too late. Usually both at the same time, depending on what kind of investment you're looking for. So this is the

hardest part. Often people are thinking they can just complete another weekend and they have the product that's already selling by itself which is often often wrong and when you're looking for investment then you're not usually looking only for money but you're looking for experience of the investor as a mentor to you and you're looking at the network of the investor as a support structure to you and this is this is uh this maybe can be said that you only get one third of investment as money if you have a good investor so i would suggest everyone to keep away from stupid money. That's good advice. Unfortunately, because IoT is such a popular thing,

everyone wants to invest in IoT, you have quite a lot of stupid money lying around. You know, we talked about this a few weeks when we talked to Debbie Meredith about venture partners and venture cap and how important it was that it wasn't just money. It really is about the mentorship and the contacts, which makes it an order of magnitude more difficult to find money. And so as people have these Arduino prototypes and they think, this is a great idea, customers will flock to me and I'm already done. They may actually be getting money flocking to them, but it may not be the right money.

And that's such a hard thing to understand. People throwing cash at you, how can that possibly be bad? And yet they're buying a portion of your company and they're not giving you what you actually need. And they start to get a vote at the table about what you're doing and how you're doing things. And they have opinions and not necessarily the good opinions. It may be the bad advice. Well, stupid money probably comes with stupid advice. Wow. So, that's, yeah, I thought we were going to be talking more about the technology of it, but this is very good advice. Do you have any more?

Oh, you have to come to Buildit to see more. And Buildit's based in Estonia as well, right? Yes, it is. So I had a question about that, just in terms of production stuff in silicon valley most of the uh most of the small startups that go into mass production have to you know start dealing with china and and production china is there any difference in the relationship with china coming from europe or estonia is is is that the same sort of situation where okay you want to build ten thousand a hundred thousand things let's hook you up with somebody in Shenzhen.

Well, China is closer to states than it is to Estonia. We have some advantages. For example, if you're talking about sourcing something from China, then the sales agents there are working up quite late in the evening, which means they're usually working up until the end of the working day in Estonia. But because it's logistically a bit far, and we have quite good prototyping facilities nearby, and also production facilities, then the question would be, what do you mean by mass production?

So if we look into different devices, then the term mass production is very different. If you are going to start making washing machines then we are talking about quite a large volume and also quite heavy logistics headache in outbound logistics. If you're talking about some mass-produced wearables then we are talking about high volumes, but maybe 10,000 of those can be sent overnight with DHL. And the cost of each and every unit has more value in it than the washing machine. I'm still surprised how can they make refrigerators so cheap. Yeah.

And if we are talking about some more niche markets, then these usually have a high value add and low volumes. So if you want anything, anything which is made by tens of thousands, then it's probably it's not worth to go to Far East. If it's fairly, fairly common electronics, then because you're just losing time, it's cheaper to pay a little bit more for the component logistics and wait more for the output logistics from the factory. That makes sense. And also another thing is in the beginning when you're ramping up the production,

then you have to sleep on the factory floor, basically. And you just have to pick where are you sleeping on the factory floor. Is it close to where the rest of your team is, or is it far away? So if it's just one hour ride to the factory, then it's probably okay to work from your office if it's a half a day flight there then you probably have to be there over the ramp up period that's something i think people in in the states and the clients that i work with uh i have trouble understanding the need to, as you say, sleep on the factory floor. You said that so much better than I did. Sleep on the factory floor.

Because there is this idea that you can just ship it off and someone will replicate it with secret, crazy replication machines. Yes, I can bring one example. Just friend some time ago received order of picture frames, which was, well, it was not well done. Half of the container was okay, but other half was having the backs of the picture frames off by three millimeters in dimensions, which means they were falling off the walls.

And that meant two things. First, they were running out of picture frames to sell because they discovered only after selling half the container full of good picture frames. And they had no one to take the responsibility for that, at least within a reasonable amount of time. This often happens in a bit more complex industries as well. Making picture frames is pretty easy. So one of the problems is that factories always tend to make what you ask them to, which is not what you want. Not usually, no. And the same problem with software and computers computers do what you ask them to not what you want and that is a big problem and so how do we how do you explain to people who have stars in their eyes with their products and how wonderful it's going

to be how do you explain to them that there are realities without diminishing their passion it's so hard for me when i want to say grow up find a business person to explain to you the realities of the money side and maybe find a marketing person to help you understand your customers. And definitely find a manufacturing engineer because otherwise your garage is going to be filled and this will be your life for the next 15 years as you try to empty your garage. How do you do that? How do you balance the here's reality versus, yeah, this is actually a good idea? Well, first you have to figure out the data. The good old saying, show me the data.

You figure out what is it what people have. Often people with spark in their eyes are really in the mood where they don't want to speak with anyone about it. Because everyone will copy it and sell it instead. However, I would say that if your device is easy to copy, then you don't have a device. There's this term here called Chinese R&D, which means retrieve and duplicate. And which means if you have something which is very easy to copy, it will be copied. And we have this joke going around on how to do manufacturing at very low, or with very low investment.

It's very easy. You do your engineering, you have your design documentation, production documentation, and then you send it off to everyone you can find in manufacturing industry saying that you need millions of units and so on and so on. Then you wait for about a month and then buy your products off from AliExpress and resell them. That's called lean manufacturing. I like this. I like this very much.

It seems really sensible. You just send them everybody you know asking for a quote. Yes. All right. It's kind of like the old joke about getting hired by the NSA. Pick up the phone and tell

your mom you want to join the NSA. Okay, back to the hackathon. I do want to ask you a couple more questions about that. What were some of your favorite entries from last year? I really like the high-heeled one,

but what else? Actually, the military chamber was, and that was a pretty good project, because that

showed good engineering, good business sense, because if you're selling something to military, the business

is a bit different than selling milk at the Walmart or something like that. And also good design because if you have soldiers going around, then they have lots of problems in their lives including being alert and ready to shoot and whatever else and at the same time they already have lots of equipment on them

so they have quite strict constraints on what extra they can carry and what kind of value it will add to what they are doing this was quite quite interesting project and then there were so many more we had 19 19 projects last year the winner was one that was an age verification tool i didn't understand what that was or the winner for the 2016 I have to check that oh okay I'm sorry

oh and that's open in big data not art and history I see I shouldn't have just randomly searched oh well yeah my cyber stalking skills are not doing me any service today what are you hoping for this year?

do you have any ideas for wild ideas you'd like to see implemented? Yes, but I don't know what they are yet. Fair enough. Because people are always ready to surprise. And when you have already 40 ideas presented, then you always have a few crazy ones coming up and saying, Oh, I just had an idea. And in the end, they will win the event. Yeah, there's some value to the spur of the moment. Synergistic ones. Yeah, okay, I can see that. Often people are just a bit too shy in the beginning.

But as the evening goes along, they get more encouraged and sometimes you have some pretty good ideas there. Well, there's some level of my ideas better than that one and they stood up there.

I can do it. One idea which I liked well there's some level of my ideas better than that one and they stood up there I can do it one idea which I liked a bit was the borage machine borage? it was like well they rebuilt the espresso machine to make borage

like oatmeal okay cool sorry borage is a plant and I was trying to work it in, and it wasn't working. So you're totally cool. Another lesson in Estonian language, and Finnish as well. Moist and unmoist, K, P, and T. Ah, yeah.

And G, D, and B are not differentiated. So is Estonian like Finnish? Yes, quite like Finnish. So most of Estonians can understand Finnish, but this is only because during Soviet times, people living on the northern coast of Estonia were watching Finnish TV, which of course was illegal but everyone was doing it. It's hard to stop electromagnetism. Actually it was easy because in Soviet Union, I can't remember which way around was it, the voice was transferred on 6.5 megahertz band and in Finland it was on 5.5 megahertz band from the base frequency. So to not only watch but to hear Finnish TV you had to have this special small electronics filter replaced or augmented in your TV.

This is like when my grandpa used to watch sporting games and he wouldn't like those announcers so he'd listen to the radio version and turn down the TV. Yes, my grandmother did the exact same thing. And now we have the internet and we can just Twitter along with it. Well, I shouldn't keep you too much longer. Christopher, do you have any last questions? Sure, while we're on the topic of Estonia.

If somebody's visiting Estonia, what are some things that they should definitely see and visit? You know, that's a very hard question, actually. I assume it's Christopher. I mean, you know, because representative of our audience. It's sort of like, if you come to Mountain Dew, you probably should see the Computer History Museum. Although 95% of the world doesn't care.

Maybe more. If you come to Tartu, you should see the Computer History Museum. Although 95% of the world doesn't care. Maybe more. If you come to Tartu, you should see the Computer History Museum. Excellent. And it's not as easy as you think because you need to agree with the person who's having it in the cellar. And then you will have several hours of very good chat about computer history

or history of computers in different parts of the world including in Tartu and Tallinn Do you have any of those 3-bit Russian computers? Or what were they? 9-bit? There are some weird computers That's just because you're based in two Russian computers? Or what were they? 9-bit? There were some weird computers that...

That's just because you're based in two. You have binary... It was trinary. No, these were not common, definitely. May have been some research project. But I've seen analog computers. Yeah.

Just different. Basically a bunch of op-amps. Okay, so Computer History Museum. What else? Where should somebody eat? yeah just different basically a bunch of op-amps okay so computer history museum what else where should somebody eat somebody eat

that's hard it is you come to California and I said where should I mean even if you come to the

Monterey Bay where should somebody eat I'm still lost you know it's Estonia there is a good place where you

should eat when you're in Estonia. You should eat close to where you are hungry. All right, I can see how this is going. But if you're interested in history, then you can go and lurk around in some abandoned Russian military objects. That sounds interesting. That does. Military history, that is. Well, during the summer, you have some incredible ocean views. The Baltic Sea?

Yes, it's not strictly an ocean that's it's baltic sea uh it's it's uh it's connected to the ocean but uh salinity is several times lower it's somewhere between the ocean and the lake. That's right. On this show, you not only learn about electronics, Arduino, mass production, linguistics, now you know about the salinity of the Baltic Sea. We were building robots to go on the Baltic Sea and measure the salinity. That's what I know. That'd be pretty cool. Which is very important for biology.

All right. Well, I have to say the Wikipedia page made me want to visit because it, I mean, there was lots of history and lots of architecture and lots of prettiness. But I would try to still answer the question. Oh, okay. but I would try to still answer the question oh okay you should decide where you want to go when you get here not have this long list of places I must visit because there are so many interesting things

that if you pick just a few of them you will be horribly biased alright that's good advice in general good advice for traveling in general If you pick just a few of them, you will be horribly biased. All right. That's good advice in general. That's good advice for traveling in general. Yes, I like that. Okay, well, what about you?

Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to leave us with, Indrik? Well, yes. As we were speaking about Arduinos and prototyping and engineers, then I would repeat what's kind of motto at Y Combinator Accelerator is if there's one thing to take from the accelerator, then it is make what people want. That's it. Make what people want. Yeah, make what people want.

Without that, there's no business. That's a better advice than my usual one, which is make what I want. You're people. I'm people, but not always. But there's also good news. Good news about that. It is so much easier to teach business to engineers than vice versa. As I always suspected. Our guest has been Indrik Verbane, CTO at Buildit Hardware Accelerator,

electronics engineer at Hedgehog Engineering, and organizer and mentor for Garage48 Hardware and Arts Hackathon. The hackathon is happening on the 17th to 19th of February 2017 at the Institute of Physics, University of Tartu in Estonia. The event is organized by Garage48, the University of Tartu, andonia. The event is organized by Garage48, the University of Tartu, and the Estonian Academy of Arts. Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting, and of course, thank you for listening. Go to embedded.fm if you'd like to read the blog, contact us, or subscribe to the YouTube channel. And now, a final thought for you. This is going to be a poem from an Estonian poet

who I should have asked Indrik to pronounce for me. Jan Kaplinsky? Is that right? No, it's Jan Kaplinsky. It's strange that you picked that because his son was in the Billet Hardware Accelerator. That's cool.

Now I'm really glad I picked it. The poem is titled I Fear Those and it goes on from what I'm going to read, but I really liked the first part. I fear those who are afraid of emptiness. I fear Pascal, but not probability theory. I do not fear Roman antiquities, for they were born in Euclidean space, as we are. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering.

It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.