In this session, 19 year old Thiel Fellow Connor Zwick talks about the democratization of hardware over the next decade and what it means for the next generation of Silicon Valley innovators from the perspective of his own hardware startup: Milkshake Labs.
His talk will briefly cover the argument of why hardware will be big: low cost prototyping technologies and automated manufacturing, the new expectation of tight software-hardware integration made popular by Apple, the parallelisms between the last few decades of software with the next few of hardware, the proliferation of "niche" devices, and the role of appcessories as a catalyst for this shift.
He will then talk about his own experience as a 19 year old with little hardware experience doing a YC hardware startup including prototyping, fundraising, kickstarter, and manufacturing a product in China.