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fra
Joined 1,941 karma
Founder/CEO at Memfault (W19). Making DevOps easy for hardware teams. Previously: Oculus, Pebble, Sun.
YC Badge: 0x7c2ae206ae6f648168712194544893e3bc412131
- fraExtremely impressive that they were able to ship inside-out tracking, pancake lenses, and eye tracking + foveated rendering. Each of these is a serious engineering challenge. Very few organizations could pull this off.
- This guy ^ runs a conference on corporate values. You can't make this stuff up...
- Hacker News formula for startups: no offices, no offsites, no meetings, and no MBAs. If only idiot CEOs and rapacious VCs were listening!
- If you, like me, were looking for a video of the demo in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=752-Oo1hok4
- In hindsight I think the correct word would be "regular software upgrades".
- Every vendor you bring in comes with switching cost, and this is no different. But we do our best to make it easy for folks to migrate off of our platform should they decide.
- Hi Pete -- email me (francois at) and I'll get you early enrolled into the special deals we have coming for Nordic customers.
- Thank you!
- Thank you!
- It's all on Github (https://github.com/nordicsemiconductor), but it is not technically open source as it is a modified BSD that does not let you use the SDKs with other chipsets.
- I'm the co-founder and CEO of Memfault. We were in the W19 YC batch. I never thought our news would make the front page of HN!
This is a very exciting day for us (after a very intense few months). We've known the Nordic team for years and could not think of a better partner to grow our platform.
Happy to answer questions, if you have them.
- Litestream has seen very little development lately and I was worried it was dead. Very glad to see Ben Johnson is continuing to push the project forward with some exciting new plans.
- [citation needed]
- As someone who builds observability tools for embedded software, I am flabbergasted that you're finding a more tools-friendly culture in embedded than in distributed systems!
Most hardware companies have zero observability, and haven't yet seen the light ("our code doesn't really have bugs" is a quote I hear multiple times a week!).
- I think this is the reason in fewer 0.01% of cases. Languages are not in the top 10 things that make being an open source maintainer difficult.
- You’d be surprised at how many hardware companies think this is a good idea!
I’m the founder and CEO of a company called Memfault, we make observability SaaS for hardware companies.
I constantly get asked if we could just offer a remote access solution. Many of our competitors do! But we think it’s (a) a huge security liability and (b) too ripe for abuse.
But fundamentally consumers do not care, and until that changes you can expect any embedded Linux device to have this kind of backdoor (they do more often than not).
- With all due respect, I don't think you know what a CEO does day to day. Investor relations and PR is ~5% of the job at an early stage startup.
- Because you won't find anyone competent to take on the terrible shit-shoveling gig that is being the CEO for an equal share in the business.
- This is a glib, but important insight. If the split between founders and early employees is fundamentally off, then we should see many more early employee types start companies and take the other side of that bargain. In fact, they do not!