Hard Tech

“And I think by the way, if you make some money in software, you kind of have an obligation to like put it into hard tech and help some of the bigger things that might advance society which are tend to be more capital intensive and intensive.”

“Yeah, Molly, my hottest take is I really do think that we're re-entering kind of the world of the here and the now, and what I mean by that is I think being successful in real space, doing hard tech, building real things, and manufacturing with real tangible i…”

“One of the things we're seeing at YC now is that number was, you know, maybe five or 10% for many years, and then now we're getting to 15, 20, 25%”

“I think there's this perception, you know, outside of hard tech, deep tech, whatever you want to call the segment we're in, that they're incredibly capital intensive, and you can't imagine how much they're spending on capex, but that's not really the case. I m…”

“For any scientist or engineer who wants to be the CEO to actually run the business, that is why Activate exists as well, because we are, you know, we firmly believe if you are trying to retire risk in these hard tech ventures in the very early days, there is a…”

“I'm very interested in biology in general, like very interested in some aspects that are hard tech because I've seen software engineering kind of becoming commoditized.”

“I realized that you didn't have banks that were aligned with the United States, interests that were aligned with deep tech, hard tech, energy, the things that are really complex and hard to understand, but that do really matter, ah, that could also serve them …”

“It's like 90% AI. It's about 10% 11% hard tech, which is awesome. And then the really crazy stat is, you know, how the last four batches, about the last year you know, the batch itself as a whole has been growing revenue by 10%. This time it's 12.”

“When you have a new great idea, even the crappy version of that idea is already amazing. Like, it already proved something amazing”

“And I think for, especially for hard tech for hardware companies, that trough of disillusionment might be like five to eight years.”

“And you know, we never use those terms because they, I mean, frankly, they just never made any sense. And certainly, and they also were just, Boring, stupid terms. They weren't galvanizing, that's for sure.”

“It's been a very deliberately engineered aesthetic effort to make hard tech sick, because if it's not, then everybody's going to end up in finance again. The next generation, the lower class of zoomers, they're going to end up doing software engineering.”

“I think a lot of it will be market-driven. It's about capitalizing on this sort of romantic desire to build stuff that I think is in the air right now.”

“And the real hard tech is going after like a five to 10 year old hard tech company that's competing in the same exact category of, as you, that has more resources, that has more learnings, that has more customer relationships.”

“This sort of, like, horizontal scale, I think works really well for hard tech, because it sort of decouples all of these risks, and then you can just sort of imagine, imagine what happens from there.”

“And I think we're just going to see a generation of venture investors burn a load of cash again on hard tech.”

“Having software investors invest in hard tech is a very different game. It is like you wouldn't have your sales team Write code. And it's the same thing. It's a very different mindset. So I think a lot of people will get burnt there”

“With the rise of AI and hard tech, I think a lot of funding will go towards really hard tech problems. And then There'll be this kind of like middle zone for everything else.”

“There are some problems where like, for example, if you're building like a hard tech startup, like you actually, you need the expertise in order to be credible, to know what you're talking about and to be able to build that product. For us, it was the kind of …”

“The broadest valley of death for hard tech, large volume manufacturing, or project businesses tends to be getting that first of a kind full commercial scale plant built.”

“I don't think there's a single success story in hard tech not one in the energy space that didn't involve massive government involvement, right? Not one.”