a love letter to humane.
If you have eyes and have been in tech circles, you have watched everyone hit the Humane AI pin piñata with a bad review stick.
I know about the issues (which are serious), and this is not an essay about that. This is an essay about friction, and the friction that takes place in our modern tech world.
When you start out in business, you learn two things very quickly.
A) You have a way better chance if you are rich, have rich parents, or have insane access to capital.
B) Clout lubricates the relationships that are the foundation for business. You need clout, or the grit and tenacity to develop it.
(P.S: I am 22 but open to being adopted by rich people who want to fund my tech fantasies)
Most of developing a career is getting those two things to gain access to more opportunities and chances to do what you want to do. If you do not start out with either, you will acquire it through what will possibly the most terrible shit in your life.
Most business people love to talk about how hard it was to get started, because it is a sort of hazing. I wrote about my own hazing here. It does in a sense, deeply traumatize you. You carry it through your career for the rest of your life that no one gives a shit if you have bills to pay, if you really love what you’re doing, if this has been your childhood dream, etc.
They just give a shit if it resonates emotionally or fiscally, and you have to convert those shits into momentum, which converts into capital and resources => world domination.
Business is a fraternity. There is a large number of people who wish to do cool shit. Rich people are automatically in because they’re legacy. The rest of you poor people will chug drinks until you throw up, get subjected to terrible and dehumanizing conditions in the name of opportunity, and then will be grateful for it (and maybe continue pouring it down other newbies once you’ve secured your place).
When you get hazed, you get a fuck ton of no, people telling you that you don’t know shit or trying to pull stuff over on you, and others trying to rework your expectations. Some of them will be kind, others will be terrible to you because people have been terrible to them.
When I think about most of my mistakes running Astra, they are mostly things that people told me which I didn’t listen to. Most of what I do as CTO is preparing my first time CEO for what she might encounter and working to smooth those bumps for us before they happen.
The hazing is the learning curve, and the curve is steep. There are fewer curves as steep as consumer hardware. Think about it: consumers are incredibly finicky. They are not governed by logic, but by usability. Usability is way harder to understand than logic.
Building anything good requires not just thinking about what users want, but seeing how they interact with your assumptions to reshape them.
In software, this is relatively easy. Codebases are throwaway. With hardware, the cost of iterating anything physical is MUCH higher.
I myself have tried to design an NFC sensor caregiving monitor and gave up, and have worked with hardware startups. I also did robots in middle school and high school until I dropped out, and one of my creations only danced to the 1975.
I have watched people build their own consumer hardware companies and get destroyed by market fluctuations and whims.
Everything I know about them tells me they are a different beast.
- People have preconceived physical notions about how products should work. That makes onboarding new interactions harder than with software.
- Consumers are incredibly price sensitive and mass adoption requires mass brand awareness (which, guess what, requires mass budgets). Early stage products are more expensive because there’s less scale of manufacturing, which makes it even harder to reach mass consumer adoption.
- Funders know hardware is terrible, and they will tell you how terrible it is before giving you money. If they give you money at all. You need lots of clout or money (ideally both) to get more.
- You have to be incredibly lean long term to make it out of v1 hell into the sweet peaks and valleys of a diversified line of hardware.
- Hardware design requires much more specialized positions compared to software, which means salaries for employees and recruiting is hard.
- Not to mention the sourcing and relationship building of manufacturers, lifecycle testing, legal, supply chain management, regulations, distribution, etc that go into creating what could easily die in the hands of people.
In terms of businesses that require the most grit and are the craziest, consumer hardware has always topped the board.
Given the two rules of being given opportunities and business (clout and money), it makes sense that legacy companies are the ones who have the ability to make big bets. If they fail, it’ll be a blow to company history and potentially a joke in pop culture like Meta’s quest or Microsoft Zune.
But, a new consumer hardware startup in our time that truly creates something that is not just an off the shelf repackagable product is truly, something to behold. Even if it sucks. It shows that people can get past the hazing, get the money, and do the insane things the rest of us dream about doing in our rooms.
Anyone can get rich sucking the teets of government contracts to build more weapons of war and surveillance. Very few people understand how terrible of a curse consumer products are and decide to build them anyways.
I think a lot of what Humane’s AI pin is comes down to the fact two software people in love at the world’s most impactful hardware company while it matured, and tried it for themselves.
Humane’s AI pin is not well received. But it shows people with a dream and execution that worked to make it into our hands, in a time where most kickstarter projects die, big tech decides what our software and hardware will be, and most new stores are just drop shipping companies. In a world that doesn’t seem to want you to, they tried.
We are incentivized to not do new things, to not break the mold. And yet, some people have. No matter what happens after it launches, it’s the fact that it launched at all.
