On this episode, we sat down with Sera Evcimen, mechanical engineer, hardware startup strategist, and host of The Builder Circle™ Podcast where she interviews hardware founders, investors and other professionals in the hardware startup ecosystem to provide practical takeaways for anyone building hardware. Sera shares her journey from watching "How It's Made" with her hardware-savvy father to working on cutting-edge fusion energy systems at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Today, Sera brings that deep technical and operational expertise to hardware startups through her firm Pratik, where she helps founders navigate everything from supply chain challenges to system architecture design. Throughout our conversation, Sera shares hard-won wisdom about the importance of hands-on experience, how understanding material science and failure modes creates competitive advantages, and why boots-on-the-ground verification beats any amount of remote due diligence.

Learn more about Sera, Pratik, and The Builder Circle™ Podcast: https://www.pratikdev.com/

Hackaday Europe 2025: Sera Evcimen - Hardware Startup Pitfalls
Orin Hoffman - S1 E9: Building a Strong Capital Stack for a Hardware Product
Ying Liu - S2 E9: Global Supply Chain Strategy

For more information on the podcast, check out https://tradeoffs.fm

In this episode of TRADEOFFS, we sit down with Justin McAfee, mechanical engineer turned hardware entrepreneur who's fostering a manufacturing renaissance in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Justin shares his unconventional journey from getting burned on a grenade launcher for firefighters at age 23 to developing advanced electric propulsion systems at Wright One Inc. He discusses how tariffs are forcing his company to onshore manufacturing from China, the surprising challenges of disrupting the "boring" CPU cooling fan industry for cryptocurrency miners, and his ambitious vision for affordable flying cars powered by ducted electric turbines. Justin also opens up about the realities of hardware fundraising, building community through Wednesday dinner parties and monthly hardware meetups, and why he believes Bridgeport can become "the Silicon Valley" of manufacturing.

Learn more about Wright One at: https://wrightfan.com

Check out the Bridgeport Hardware Meetup if you're in the area: Link

Nate and Chris chat with Valentina Ratner, co-founder and CEO of Allspice.io, a collaboration and automation platform that brings software development workflows to hardware engineering. Valentina started her career as a mechanical engineer at Amazon before founding Allspice to transform how electronics teams design PCBs. The three discuss the challenges hardware engineers face with outdated collaboration tools, how Allspice adapts Git workflows for electronics design, and Valentina’s experience transitioning from technical engineer to startup CEO and sales leader. This episode is full of insights on building developer tools, creating customer love, and the evolving intersection of hardware and software development practices.

For more information on Valentina and AllSpice: https://allspice.io

If you're interested in improving hardware workflows, AllSpice is hiring: https://allspice.io/careers

For more information on the podcast, check out https://tradeoffs.fm