Relentless How US Hardware Startups Will Outcompete China | Pari Singh, Flow
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Oct 6, 2025 Pari Singh, Founder and CEO of Flow, is a former rocket engineer on a mission to revolutionize hardware design. He discusses the transition from traditional engineering to an agile paradigm, highlighting how U.S. hardware startups can outpace China. Pari shares insights on SpaceX's iterative successes and the importance of embracing complexity over a top-down approach. He emphasizes the need for cultural shifts alongside technology, making a case for the U.S. to focus on reliability and AI to reclaim manufacturing supremacy.
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Software-Style Iteration For Hardware
- Flow built an internal platform that turned repeated manual engineering steps into an abstraction enabling rapid iterative design.
- This software-style, bottoms-up workflow lets hardware teams iterate complexity multiple times per day rather than follow long waterfall cycles.
Culture Trumps Vertical Integration
- The decisive advantage of SpaceX and new hardware firms is their iterative, software-like development culture rather than mere vertical integration.
- That bottoms-up approach scales productivity and will replace traditional prime contractors over time.
When Waterfall Breaks Down
- When system complexity crosses a threshold, top-down Gantt planning fails and bottoms-up, parallel iteration becomes necessary.
- High-complexity systems must run many parallel experiments because unknown unknowns dominate early design.
