AllSpice co-founders Valentina Ratner and Kyle Dumont alongside investor Chrissy Meyer joined All About Circuits’ Daniel Bogdanoff on episode 56 of their podcast Moore’s Lobby. They discuss the Git-style collaboration environment that brings software best practices to hardware design.

Conversation highlights

How did the band get together to create your hardware development platform?

Valentina and Kyle met at Harvard University while completing their MS/MBA program. They found their backgrounds, skills, and interests complemented one another. From there, they combined their expertise to explore the space and see where they could add value to the engineering industry.

Chrissy met the dynamic duo while they were still completing their engineering matriculation. After a coffee shop sit-down, she had a clear picture of their vision and purpose. Also, having an engineering background caused her to resonate with the issues in the hardware industry that Kyle and Valentina were striving to correct. 

When brainstorming to start the development platform, what were some do’s and don’ts?

The co-founders sought to solve problems that engineers face first. So, a developer tool that helps engineers design effective products that make their day-to-day more efficient made the most sense. And their main reference was software – they studied how it was built and what tools they could implement for hardware.  

Tell us about holes in the electronics design that you were looking to fill with AllSpice

There were many aspects missing from the electronics industry that were taken into account while building AllSpice. The main improvement they wanted to make was making it easier to build a workflow and hardware design collaboration process for electronics designs. They also wanted to bring hardware and software teams together and make the collaboration cloud-based. Lastly, the pair desired to enable remote teams to work together.

As an engineer, when you see an idea like this for an engineering start-up, how do you evaluate whether it’s worth investing in?

As an engineer, the idea of AllSpice fit exactly with her needs and wants. She has worked with teams that used GitHub but lacked knowledge of aspects such as components, repositories, and their respective files. Naturally, she wanted to change that.

As an investor, it was important for Chrissy to ask questions and evaluate the platform’s future. Some of the questions include:

• Can a big business be built with this? 
• Can this be turned into a multibillion-dollar business? What does that path look like?
• What are the risks?
• Is the market big enough?
• How do you monetize it, and what does pricing look like?
• How easily will it be adopted by hardware engineers, electrical engineers, and PCB designers?

What are some tips for folks who are looking to get a project or company funded?

When approaching venture capitalists (VCs), you don’t always have to have a perfect pitch deck, financial model, and forecast projections. Many want entrepreneurs to present pitches that are still in the works and maybe even still have a few problems they want to solve in the engineering industry. That way, early-stage investors can, in comparison with other experiences, point out pitfalls, challenges, and advantages. 

From a founder’s perspective, “it is less about convincing anyone and more about finding the people that already believe in the version of the world that you are trying to build.”

Listen to the full podcast here:

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