How to Design Hardware Products with Hosain Rahman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 17)

Very exciting! Thank you, Sam, for having me. Sam and I have known each other for a long time because we were fellow Sequoia companies and met in the early days of when he was on his company journey. So, it’s cool.

What he asked me to talk about today was a little bit about sort of the hard work journey of building products. What I wanted to do is give you guys a little bit of an overview of what we do, how we think about the world, and how that informs how we build products. Then, I’ll go specifically into the process of how we design, how we develop, and how that all kind of comes together, and sort of what we do to change categories.

So, first off, I would like to start with sort of the broadest thinking. The way we look at the world is we think of ourselves at this intersection of really crafted innovation and engineering that’s almost invisible to the user in terms of its functionality. That’s at the intersection of, even beyond design. We’ve been doing design products for, you know, well over a decade now. We think of it as going—the conversation has shifted even beyond design into