Finally, a hardware accelerator: Bolt's Ben Einstein on a leg up for startups

Experienced product designer and entrepreneur Ben Einstein is part of a team in Boston looking to give hardware startups their fair share of the glory. Bolt, a new accelerator program that Einstein cofounded, aims to be a tool kit for hardware start-ups rather than for software and Web-services companies—popular draws for talent and investment that in the current environment have more support at their disposal. Einstein recently spoke to EDN about what Bolt is, what types of young companies it is looking for, and why the focus is on hardware.

Tell us what Bolt is all about.

A: We focus on the startup community. We’re basically an accelerator program designed to help hardware companies. The general premise is that if you are building a software company, there are so many resources available that are incredibly useful—software review, mentoring programs—and raising money is often fairly easy because there is so much awareness and popularity in the space. Bolt is explicitly built from the ground up to do similar things, but for hardware companies.

Bolt's Ben Einstein

We have prototyping facilities and a full-time engineering staff; we help people go to Asia for manufacturing and tooling; we know how to talk to buyers. We have an open application process; anyone from anywhere in the world can apply. We will accept between 10 and 12 teams every six months and give them a little seed capital to help keep them alive.

Why focus on physical products as opposed to software or an app?

A: There are maybe 150 [support programs] for software in the US [alone]. And there’s this device phenomenon that is about to explode. [The targeted] companies act like software companies in terms of their revenue structure, the kinds of founders they attract, the way the IP is locked up, but they tend to have a piece of hardware that is sort of a barrier to entry.

There’s a phrase that is thrown around, “software wrapped in plastic,” which is what some of these companies begin to look like. They have a relatively simple piece of hardware, but it ends up enabling a new set of functionality and user applications [so that they] work like software companies; they have reoccurring revenue streams, multiple products around one piece of hardware, and reoccurring interactions with customers.

There’s also [the fact that] these hardware companies aren’t being helped at all. It’s very difficult for some of these young companies to get the tools and systems they need to get to market, whereas in the app world a lot of that is pretty easy to come by. We are trying to leverage that.

Doing manufacturing isn't necessarily hard, but a lot of people that these young companies are approaching for advice are not the people who know how to make hardware, and that makes it more frustrating for them.

What are you looking for?

A: Great teams, but we are really looking for great people. The [online] application is tailored to find teams of great people. It’s really simple; it’s not designed to be a business plan.

You are obviously big on prototyping, then.

A: Of course.

When it comes to prototyping, what can an entrepreneurial engineer learn from a company like Dyson or iRobot or other former start-ups that showed distinct, difficult, or maybe risky designs in their beginnings?

A: That's one of these unfortunate things in the product-development world—these phantom or ghost products that wind up being showcased in some sort of great way for design but never end up making it to production. Dyson is very good with that; they are one of the companies that demonstrated a lot of their prototypes.

Bolt is based on building markets and helping people find their way along the path of building a product. It’s less about the sexy, sleek prototype that people are really attracted to. The MVP— minimum viable product—approach involves doing as little as possible to prove that somebody really likes what you are doing. It’s part of the lean start-up movement ... and involves growing the company around a core group of users and satisfying that need.

We take a similar approach when building products. When it comes to actual physical prototyping, we do a pretty significant amount of that and have an in-house prototyping facility, so people can assemble and tweak as needed.

What are your thoughts on 3-D printers?

A: 3-D printers are great. They’ve fallen dramatically in price in the last decade. They are unbelievably useful for certain things, but they are a little oversold. We use [the 3-D printer] as a fantastic tool for rapid prototype development, but it’s not [yet the] fantastic tool for production of millions of units of things that people say it may be one day. It may be one day, but the technology really doesn’t exist yet to be even close to cost-competitive with injection molding or other high-end volume production techniques.

When people think about startups, they think about twenty-somethings just out of school. Do you see opportunities for more experienced engineers?

A: We expect a good portion of our applicants to be in that [younger] category. But the other category is the frustrated engineers who are at a company like Apple or Motorola and have sort of been in their middle position and chugging along but feel that they want to be more creative and try out their own concept. Those [engineers] are really attractive to us. The only trick is that we are not providing enough capital to provide for families when the business is getting started. They have to be able to basically survive on their own for six months or so.

We expect that a smaller pool of the applicants would be these kinds of guys, but we encourage them to apply. You have to have a certain kind of crazy to start a company, especially in hardware, and that tends to be beaten out of people as they get older. But their experience [can be] incredibly valuable. Even if they are not leading the charge, it’s great to have them on a team with two or three younger guys.

Einstein will be presenting at next month’s Design East conference, hosted by UBM. Register and get more information at http://east.ubmdesign.com.