Raspberry Pi

Commodity hardware + ML lets software devs build hardware companies

Furqan's core thesis: cheap off-the-shelf boards like a ~$30 Raspberry Pi mean a developer no longer has to design custom computer boards for a device. Pairing commodity hardware with machine learning collapses what used to be half a hardware company's work.

“Yeah, it's like a $30 computer. It's like a little board. And it's important because now a developer previously, they would have had to design their own little small computer board to go build a small— like, if you wanted to build a Roomba, you'd have to go design a little computer to put in the Roomba. Then designed the Roomba. Now you can kind of go pick up this like computer that's just a little board and you can put it into anything. So like, you know, it took half your company away of what you needed to do to make this happen.”

Steal thisBuild hardware products on commodity boards plus ML instead of custom electronics; the off-the-shelf board removes half the work and lets a software team ship hardware.