Hardware Start-Ups - How to Build a Hot New Product

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When you're building something new and exciting and disruptive, you really don't know how it's going to do a til you launch it. The timing and the visibility that you have between your supply and demand curves is a complete miss match. To even be able to deliver it and bring it to market, you need to make big commitments prior to that. "Once you make those commitments like that, money ain't coming back," he says.

In this episode from February 2017, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal, former Lytro CEO (now Vice President, Subscription Services, at Google) share stories and lessons learned from doing whatever they could to help their companies survive in hard times, including making and living through major pivots, selling new products before they were ready, figuring out financing with market and industry headwinds against them, and more. From their days together at LoudCloud to Jason’s experience at Lytro, and beyond, a common theme emerges: a CEO’s job is lonely in these moments and the hardest thing about a big pivot or change might be in finding the courage to make the decision in the first place.