When I joined the team at SOSV’s HAX, a venture program designed to help early-stage hardware founders, my friends in tech shook their heads. Hadn�

The rapid hard-tech emergence

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2021-06-14 05:30:04

When I joined the team at SOSV’s HAX, a venture program designed to help early-stage hardware founders, my friends in tech shook their heads. Hadn’t I learned yet that hardware is too hard? What they didn’t see was a hardware scene evolving rapidly in contrast to its glacial reputation. The old hard-knocks hardware playbook has given way to a new, vastly more exciting one; emerging to meet civilization-level opportunities, like climate, that software cannot resolve alone.

Today when I work with with founders in the HAX program, it is normal to build incredible (but feasible) plans to “reduce the world’s energy consumption by 10%” from Seppure , “eliminate all waste in the apparel supply chain” at Unspun or “make global battery recycling 5x more profitable” with Green Li-ion .

Ambitions like those reflect emerging mega-trends in the global economy centered around demands to decarbonize, modernize infrastructure, secure supply chains and fully digitize traditional industries.