Jared Friedman - Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders

TL;DR

Hard-tech and biotech companies require significant time and money to build a first product, and technical feasibility is uncertain. Counterintuitively, these companies are often easier to start than ordinary ones because they attract press, talent, and investors more readily.

Key insights

• Hard-tech companies face primarily technical risk (can it be built?) rather than market risk (will people want it?), whereas normal software companies face mostly market risk.
• Sam Altman’s paradox: “In many ways it’s easier to start a hard company than an easy company” – launching a hard-tech product is harder, but everything afterward (press, recruiting, investor interest)
• Blake from Boom built a mobile shopping app (easy launch, hard to grow) and then a supersonic jet (hard launch, easy to grow); the difficulty of the build attracts talent and attention that a simple a