For this episode, we sat down with Rob Leonard, founder and CEO of Vector7, a product development, R&D, and business development consultancy. Rob is a serial entrepreneur and hardware operator who previously led the shows at Pensar and Tactile, two legendary product development firms in Seattle. He’s also an autodidactic who taught himself most of what he knows about hardware and manufacturing, and somehow still has time on the side to be a sculpture artist who uses math and CNCs to make beautiful installations that do beautiful things with light and shadow.

Rob is a fascinating person who’s career has taken countless turns over the years. His deep experience in hardware has given him a world class network and insights into the tradeoffs inherent in building effective hardware organizations and agencies that’s unmatched in the industry.

We drop a lot of names in this episode! Here are a few of the key links Rob mentions during the conversation:

Vector 7 (Rob’s consultancy): https://vector7.com/

Mathscaper (Rob’s art practice): https://www.mathscaper.com/

Mathscaper Instagram (art practice visual smorgasbord): https://www.instagram.com/mathscaper/

Laced Golf (one of Rob’s key clients where he is the Technology Architect): https://lacedgolf.com/

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

For this episode, we sat down with Brian Chen, founder and CEO of Kite Compliance, an AI-powered product-compliance platform built to make certification faster, safer, and less painful to scale. We discuss building hardware during the last hardware renaissance, surviving lockdowns while running a business dependent on in-office work, and how regulators can make life very difficult for hardware founders.

Brian dropped out of MIT Sloan after one semester to co-found Bluesmart, the YC W15 smart-luggage startup that raised $2.2M on Indiegogo before airlines banned non-removable batteries and grounded the category entirely. He then co-founded ROOM, creators of those modular office phone-booths we’ve all taken calls from. There he scaled the business to $60M in annual revenue before selling it to contract-furniture maker OFS in 2023.

Today Brian is focused on helping companies solving hard problems overcome compliance and regulatory hurdles. On the side, he's an active angel investor backing other founders.

Learn more about Kite Compliance at http://kitecompliance.ai/

For more information on the podcast, check out https://tradeoffs.fm
Episode: T-26-014

On this episode, we sat down with Will Blaze, technical recruiter and founder of Blaze Talent, where he helps hardware and AI companies scale their engineering teams. Will shares his journey from scrappy startup recruiting at Birchbox to scaling Peloton from 150 to nearly 10,000 people, and getting laid off twice in 2022, including once while on paternity leave.

Today, Will brings that experience to companies like CoreWeave and Andium, helping them hire the right people at the right time. Throughout our conversation, Will shares lessons on when to hire full-time versus contractors, why structured interviews matter more than most founders think, and the trade-offs you have to make when you can't check all 10 boxes.

Learn more about Will and Blaze Talent: www.blazetalent.com

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