Fika Bytes: Tales of Hard Tech
by Vigs
Interviewing hardware entrepreneurs to bring you a behind-the-scenes look into building and shipping innovative physical devices that change our interactions with the real world.
Episodes
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Quitting Apple to go all in on a hardware startup - with Dhaval Patel, Lotus Founder & CEO
✍️ Show Notes In this episode, we get an inside look into the mind of a high performing Big Tech engineer-turned hardware founder. Dhaval Patel began his career at Apple, working through the ranks from an intern all the way to senior manager. At one point, he started to feel the itch to build his...
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Building for yourself then pivoting into a life-saving niche
✍️ Show NotesMark Condon built the iPupPee device to address a very personal pain point he felt with his chocolate lab, Champ. Not long after he started sharing his product with the people around him, he realized that what he had built had much bigger, life-saving possibilities within the service...
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Academic Research to Product: Filling the gap between the lab and the launch
✍️ Show Notes Jana Rieger of Breth Tech is a clinician-scientist who turned her research into a hardware product, co-founding and becoming CEO of True Angle. She shares her story and her passion to see more research outcomes turning into useful consumer products 🔗 Breth Tech: the Fitbit of...
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From Ivy League engineer to hardware founder
✍️ Show NotesNaom graduated from an Ivy League and was scrolling through his 'Ideas' notes page trying to figure out what he wanted to do next when he decided to create a heated vibration massager to help his jaw pain. This is the story of how he built the product and the business, myTMJ…
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Trend to Tribe: How Totem turned virality into community
✍️ Show Notes Carter Fowler, CEO & co-founder of Totem Labs, shares the incredible journey of going viral and building hardware tech for music festivals. Carter shares valuable lessons in building not only a brand, but also an engaged community of loyal fans, with thoughtful product design and...
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Combining AI and Robotics
✍️ Show Notes Mahesh Krishnamurthi, co-founder of Vayu Robotics, gives an inside look at the journey of creating an AI-powered delivery robot. Important questions we discuss: how to know when you have product market fit, how to grow a talented team, and how to know when you should raise money. 🔑...
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Turning a Love for Music into a Hardware Product
✍️ Show Notes Tobias Butler shares his journey of building Tuneshine, blending software and hardware. He talks about the challenges of switching to hardware, the importance of prototyping, and what he learned along the way. He also dives into supplier relationships, scaling smart, and the…
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Building Hardware to Strengthen Mind-Muscle Connection with Ethan Pollak
✍️ Show Notes Joining us this week is Ethan Pollak, co-founder of Pulse Device, a small nifty device that incorporates the idea of muscle tapping to help you get the most of your weightlifing workouts. Ethan quit his job in finance to go full-time on his idea, partnering with a design studio and...
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Wearables That Unlock Women’s Potential in Midlife - featuring Loewen Cavill, CEO @ Amira
✍️ Show Notes: Loewen Cavill joins us this week to share her story as the founder and CEO of Amira, a health tech company helping women unlock their full potential. We touch on all things product development including prototyping, meeting manufacturers, and raising venture capital. It's an…
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Starting a Hardware Business in College with Cade Spector
✍️ Show Notes Cade Spector was just a sophmore in college when his brother tragically took his own life due to substance abuse. With no formal engineering or business background, Cade knew he had to find a way to honor his brother's legacy, and he has done exactly that. He is now a college…
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Solve Your Own Problem, Serve a Niche
Jon Fawcett created Sugar Pixel: He saw a problem at home, solved it for his family, and then discovered it would help millions of people around the globe. ✍️ Show Notes: Jon Fawcett went from running an engineering design company to accidentally creating an iPhone accessories company that…
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Sit On The Floor More! With Greg Klein, creator of floor-sitting-to-standing desk
✍️ Show Notes: While working from home during COVID, Greg Klein wanted to sit on the floor. But he couldn't find a desk that actually allowed for that. So, he scratched his own itch and brought to life the world's first electric floor-sitting to standing desk. Listen to Greg's entrepreneurship...
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The Earth and Engineering
✍️ Show Notes: Dan Casciato and his team at Lightbrite are building mostly in stealth, but Dan has some strong perspectives on the interplay between engineering and the Earth - our environment, our home, and our place in it. This is a thought-provoking episode about sustainable product…
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Red light therapy brings better sleep for all: Helight
Greg from Helight joins this week and talks about his background as an audio engineer, and how that translates over to light engineering, as well as some of the challenges and lessons learned while building and shipping Helight (over 70,000 units sold in the past few years!). The science behind...
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Find your inner child with Truest North Compass
Karl joins us with his amazing storytelling to share how he manifested fun and wonder into his latest invention, the Truest North Compass. 🔗 Check out truestnorthcompass.com 🔑 Bytes: Do childish things with an adult focus and energy :) Use storytelling to capture your audience and truly reach...
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Using Water to Store Energy: Greener Power with GreenPWR
Mitch joins the show this week to talk about his journey hopping between corporate and startups, and now starting his own venture — GreenPWR. His first product, the SunHopper-D, aims to utilize existing water tanks as thermal batteries. Their goal is to make products that work with renewable…
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Lace Up with LaceClips: Sport-specific fitness tracking
This week I'm chatting with Jonathan, who is reimagining fitness tracking specifically for sports in order to measure things like steps, jumps, and pivots. The origin story is a fun one - sometimes building hardware just happens serendipitously! Takeaways: Go after the underserved. For example:...
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Make any watch smart with Ganance
The dynamic duo, Alex & Ian join me from Ganance, where they're bringing fitness metrics to classic watches, combining sensor tech with stylish choices. We dig into the inspiration and ideation process as well as some really technical details with fellow firmware engineer Ian. My 3 takeaways…
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Safer Beach Days with the Sun-A-Wear UV Tracker
Sam joins us on Fika Bytes this week to talk about developing the sun-a-wear UV tracker going from prototyping to production. My favorite part was what he decided to do when they were having difficulty getting a battery into the design... Listen to the episode to find out what he did. My 3...
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A Weightlifting Coach In Your Pocket: Calibrex
Nick from Calibrex talks about combining his passion for fitness and hardware into this pocket-sized coach. 3 Things To Takeaway A crowdsourced feature board to gather ideas from users and prioritize development Offload heavy computation to the phone app so the device can be lean, mean, and...
About this show
Interviewing hardware entrepreneurs to bring you a behind-the-scenes look into building and shipping innovative physical devices that change our interactions with the real world.
Hosted by
Vigs
Categories