Eric Migicovsky
Founder, Core Devices. On 1 show, 2 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorengineerexecutivehost@ericmigi ↗LinkedIn ↗ericmigi.com ↗Wikipedia ↗YouTube ↗
Eric Migicovsky is the creator of the Pebble smartwatch and the co-founder of universal messaging app Beeper. After serving as a partner at Y Combinator, he founded Core Devices to build e-paper wearables.
1shows
2appearances
41statements
7resolved
6supported
1contradicted
86%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Eric Migicovsky said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Migicovsky: Oculus' iterative hardware approach beat Magic Leap's secretive, mega-funded R&D
“Magic Leap raised lots of money and spent just 11 years working on a product, versus Oculus, which raised two million dollars on Kickstarter, shipped a, you know, an early development kit that was not amazing, but they iterated and they got through, and now th…”
Migicovsky: Pivot to building end products if customers won't buy your technology
“If you're in a situation where you're building something that's, like, mind-blowingly cool and revolutionary, but you're finding that customers don't want to buy it, pivot your company so you're actually doing what your customers would have done, and just use …”
Migicovsky: Patents are not a critical initial step for startups
“This is, like, one of those things that people who are not in the startup world think is a critical piece of starting a business, because they may have heard of, like, someone else who got screwed out of their idea or something like that. But if you're startin…”
Graham and Andreessen's product-market fit definitions are lagging indicators
“Paul Graham's definition for product market fit is when you've made something that people want. Marc Andreessen also has an amazing blog post about product market fit where he describes it as when the product is just being pulled out of you, when you no longer…”
Migicovsky: Overhyped hardware crowdfunding campaigns usually fail to ship
“Most of those campaigns, even if they do succeed at raising money, usually fail to produce and actually ship their product.”
Migicovsky: Early hardware startups cannot pay contractors enough to care like founders
“Some of the most painful moments of my early career were, ah, not having full-time co-founders, and having to work with contractors or consultants who, honestly, like, you can't pay someone enough to care. I mean, firstly because you probably don't have that m…”
Migicovsky: Hardware startups should hack existing products instead of hiring design firms
“Don't hire, like, An industrial design firm to build you some new design. Don't hire, like, an engineering firm that promises to do a custom design for you, because that'll cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it probably will be the wrong product, versu…”
Migicovsky: Startups rarely build successful moats using patents outside biotech
“So it's very rare that startups build a successful moat using patents. This happens much more in, like, biotech”
Migicovsky: Top investors prefer startups targeting small initial markets
“Honestly, the best investors will want to see a small market, because a small market at the beginning means you can identify who's in that market very cheaply, versus having to boil the ocean, saying, well, there's like, Two percent of all people in the world …”
Migicovsky: Startups should test hypotheses by layering MVPs on existing products
“One of the hacks that I like to use at this stage is to actually layer the MVP onto the existing product. So for example, if there's already some software that your users, not your users, like the people in the community are already using to track their compet…”
Migicovsky: Target problems customers are already actively attempting to solve
“Those are usually the problems that I like to start with because Like the person's already trying to find a solution. So they're primed when you come to talk to them, like to be excited and to try it versus you having to like pitch them hard and like changing …”
Migicovsky: Top hardware startups begin by assembling off-the-shelf components
“Some of the best hardware companies that I've worked with, even though they now make their own hardware and they build a bunch of custom stuff. They started using, they started by using off-the-shelf systems like Raspberry Pis, cameras, just existing technolog…”
Migicovsky: Startup one-liners should explain current product rather than all-encompassing visions
“Here's actually a problem that a lot of founders run into, is they think that their one-liner or their short description has to encompass, like, everything that they'll ever do under the ends of the earth, because they think that, like, investors only will get…”
Migicovsky: Build MVPs around the smallest action with outsized impact
“The way that I would start building an MVP is kind of like what we mentioned at the beginning. It's taking what you already do on a regular basis, like maybe you go to meetups, maybe you, like, are on Reddit for the subreddit of that city, and, like, think cle…”
Migicovsky: Founders should iterate on target market before adding features
“Instead of iterating on the product, like building more features, they actually iterate on the market.”
Migicovsky: Early startups need unscalable feedback because founders do not know what questions to ask
“The reason in this case is actually you don't know the questions to ask yet, and so you want a really high bandwidth A really wide, broad way of collecting feedback, because you don't know the questions that you want to ask yet”
Migicovsky: Developers prematurely shoot down ideas before evaluating potential upside
“I think too often, especially, like, developers, we're already internalizing the, like, How difficult things are going to be to build when we might not have understood, like, the potential benefit from building this, and it's always a trade-off. So, like, go b…”
Migicovsky: Starting a company requires only building product and talking to users
“At the core of kind of YC's teachings, there are only two things that you must do in order to start your company. You need to code or build your product and talk to users.”
Migicovsky: Asking users hypothetical feature questions yields bad data
“Second mistake that we pretty much all make is we talk about hypotheticals. We talk about what our product could be. We talk about features that we want to build. We ask questions like we ask questions like, if we built this Feature. Would you be interested in…”
Migicovsky: Customers Not Seeking Solutions Won't Care About New Products
“If customers, if potential customers are not already exploring potential solutions to their problem, it's possible that the problem that you're trying to solve is not a burning enough problem for customers for them to be even interested in your better solution…”
Migicovsky: Ask for user phone numbers at signup to clarify data anomalies
“Ask your users for the phone number during signup. Because oftentimes you'll be looking at the data and you'll be wondering, you know, why did, why is the data showing this particular Kind of learning about our customers. And you may be like thinking in aggreg…”
Migicovsky: Compliments are the worst feedback because they lack actionable specifics
“Some of the kind of worst bad data that you may encounter is compliments. People may say, oh, I love the new design, or man, this thing is really useful. You may love that during the course of your user interviews, but they actually are not useful information …”
Migicovsky: Hand-assembling early hardware units limits catastrophic loss from manufacturing bugs
“It was a really good thing that we were making them one by one, or else we could have potentially made, like, hundreds with that same problem right at the beginning and had lost, you know, basically everything.”
Migicovsky: Pebble spent its entire post-YC $250k funding round on inventory
“We raised a bit of money about 250,000 dollars including this kind of large check that we got from, ah, one investor. And I took all that money and invested in inventory, because I thought at the time the biggest constraint on us growing was we didn't have a r…”
The other half of the tape: Eric Migicovsky's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Adora Cheung 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 2
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Eric's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Founder, Core Devices | 2 +1 | 41 | 86% 6/7 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |