YC Partner Jared Friedman covers hard-tech companies and why founders should consider starting one. He also covers a couple of the most common problems hard-tech companies face and how to solve them, with examples from seven YC companies.

You can find the lecture slides and transcript here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/78

Find more Startup School and YC content at https://www.startupschool.org/library.

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) -
00:00 - Introduction
00:36 - Outline
00:56 - What is a Hard Tech Company?
01:35 - Market vs Technical risk
02:06 - Why start a hard-tech company?
02:42 - Story about Boom
05:38 - Hard-tech and Biotech - Big part of YC
06:04 - Startup School
06:20 - How much of YC's advice applies to hard-tech founders?
07:05 - Two biggest problems specific to hard-tech
07:14 - Heavy MVP
07:58 - Boom - Do things that don't cost money
08:46 - Solute
08:47 - Solugen - Start small
09:35 - AirX - Launch a simplified version
10:22 - Notable Labs - Bootstrap with a service
10:45 - Astranis - Start with a proof of concept
11:33 - Ginkgo Bioworks - Sell it before you make it
12:24 - How do you prove people will want your product if it is not built yet?
12:49 - Pre Sales
13:27 - Letter of Intent (LOI)
14:20 - Advice about LOIs
14:43 - Fundraising for Hard-tech and Biotech companies
15:38 - A better fundraising plan
17:26 - Q&A
17:40 - AI companies
19:36 - Hard to get LOIs
20:53 - How do you prove that your idea is going to work?
22:15 - Sales
23:24 - Find founder and early employees for Hard-tech companies