[m-ee]

I joined a small startup headed by a former professor, financed by a mix of SBIR grants and seed funding, and he was really poorly suited to running a hardware company. The biggest gap was the ability to push for schedule and manufacturability vs perfecting one of prototypes. Sometimes you have to say “this solution may be better, but the tooling costs and schedule impacts are untenable. Run with what we have” In his mind as long as we had money to keep making prototypes that was what we should do until it was absolutely perfect, it made for a great demo product that had no chance of seeing the light of day at scale. He didn’t really understand what it took to get from proto to EVT, investors did and they slowly faded from the picture.