Last year’s post “You Should be Working on Hardware” was mostly targeted at people with established careers and financial security,

How to Learn Hardware

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2024-06-09 00:00:03

Last year’s post “You Should be Working on Hardware” was mostly targeted at people with established careers and financial security, but I was surprised to see it enjoyed much wider readership.

Disclaimer: My own path to hardware has been personal, contingent, and path dependent. Do not feel obliged to validate my mistakes by repeating them. Also, hardware businesses are objectively much more capital intensive, risky, and challenging to execute. If you’re optimizing over expected returns in a finite lifetime, the best strategy is to pick the highest return thing with a decent chance of success for you. Starting some insanely high risk hardware company is probably not that. Elon Musk thought he would probably fail at both Tesla and SpaceX but that it was worth trying anyway – but he would have a soft enough landing even if he failed.

Anyway, lots of people have asked me how to go about learning hardware. This places me in a predicament, because I don’t know much about hardware – I started a hardware company in part to learn as much as I could as quickly as I could – with some success. I also learned more than I bargained for about labor law compliance and facilities management. Well, it’s all part of the puzzle.