[roymurdock]

This conflicts with the way he uses the term "hard tech" to differentiate from software startups, as if the two are mutually exclusive:

It’s relatively easy for a software startup to take short cycle times and low-costs to an extreme, but hard tech founders are often surprised by how effectively they can do this, too.

What I think he is really referring to as "hard tech" is the move from the consumer electronics and office automation markets to the grittier, less-visible industrial verticals: Automotive, industrial, energy & utilities, aerospace & defense, etc. Verticals which have generally been dominated by a GE/Siemens/Boeing/ABB/Schneider etc. due to the high R&D costs needed to realize a certified, generally safety-critical solution in a highly bureaucratic environment.

Dropbox is down for a few hours? We'll have a few pissed customers. The ADAS system in a customer's car failed momentarily? They'll be lucky to survive and massive lawsuits/loss of business could ensue.

As an aside he should really define key terms up front to avoid this sort of confusion and to allow us to focus on his main point: YC is trying to move into and disrupt this lucrative but hard-to-broach space.

[throwaway729]

Exactly. I think that itself actually an interesting "hard tech" problem: how do you move fast, iterate, and be first-to-market without killing anyone?

[haimez]

You do not move fast and iterate if you care at all about the cost of failures. Period.

[throwaway729]

I did say it's a hard tech problem... :)

(But seriously, at least in theory, there are sort of obvious things you can do to isolate anything failure-critical behind statically or dynamically checked contracts, which then allows rapid iteration outside of the small set of things that are truly failure-critical. But you need those contracts trustworthy enough that you can iterate without worry, flexible enough that you can iterate on economically important sub-components, and applicable to a system or set of systems where this iteration gives you the trump card in a billion dollar(s) industry. As I said, it's "hard tech" -- which almost by definition means some people will think it's impossible.)

[mountaineer22]

I don't think you do. You want to be number 2, and swoop in when the time is right.