[gwu78]

I like this essay a lot.

In the early days of Apple, the founders placed minimum orders for parts on 30-day credit, then built the computers in 10 days and sold them before the payment for the parts came due. There wasn't any sexy software at that point. Apple was a hardware startup.

Web startups are in general probably more attractive to VC, but I'm excited about hardware startups.

[wslh]

I am excited too but since it is a mass scale business I think it is important to focus on machines/robots to build the hardware.

[gwu78]

But at what stage do you adopt this focus? From Day 1? The point of the anecdote about Apple is that they began their startup by doing something unscalable. Not only was building computers by hand unscalable, but the financial risk they took was unreasonable. What if they failed to sell enough of their computers to cover the cost of the parts?

Many businesses that you see as "mass scale" may have began life as "small scale" ones. Check your assumptions.