Last year, HWTrek sponsored 30 hardware startups and creators to visit Taiwan and Beijing on the Asia Innovation Tour 2014. We’re doing it again this August. We reached out to Steven Stoddard (Director of Operations and Co-founder of CoolChip Technologies), a participant in the tour last year, to see what he’s been up to during the past year.
HWTrek: We’d love to catch up with what you’ve been doing since you attended Asia Tour last year. What are you working on?
Steven: Since last year, CoolChip went through 2 accelerators [Highway1 and Techstars], showcased its tech at CES, and has been bringing 2 products through development in both the consumer and enterprise spaces for computer cooling.
What are some of major lessons you learned along your entrepreneurship journey?
People are your greatest asset (whether internal to your company or not). Whatever is your biggest problem today, someone, somewhere has already solved it (or something very close to it). Find them and ask for help / advice.
What advice would you give someone who might have an idea, but has yet launch a hardware startup?
Talk about your idea with anyone who will listen. It will help refine and challenge your idea and it costs nothing.
Looking back a year on now, what are your takeaways from participating in the tour last year?
Ecosystem is super important and you need to embed yourself / your company in the place(s) where products like yours are designed / engineered / manufactured.
Earlier this year, Steven had this to say, “HWTrek led our first experience in Asia and introduced us to dozens of potential customers and suppliers. We even ended up raising money from an angel investor we met on the trip! We’re still working on our first manufacturing agreement, but I would recommend HWTrek to any startup who thinks they might manufacture or sell in Asia someday.”
What trend do you see that is changing your sector or what shift would you like to see happen?
IoT is really just the latest manifestation of the ‘cloud’; development of data centers is still in its infancy.
Do you have any recommendations for a must-read/watch/listen article, book, blog, film, or podcast, etc.?
Silicon Valley (the HBO show) is hilarious and scarily on-point. One could do worse than to get their entrepreneurial education by watching that show.
